MAGA’s Messy California Critique

By Noah Rothman

Friday, January 17, 2025

 

The thing about “smart brevity” is that you will pay for that concision by having to do a lot of the work you might otherwise expect from reporters and editors. To wit, Axios’s item today on the MAGA movement’s sordid “information war” against California even as “L.A. burns,” which presented its readers with an arduous puzzle.

 

“More than a week after the Palisades Fire erupted — and with three major infernos still burning — Republicans are still flooding the zone with allegations of gross mismanagement by California Democrats,” reporter Zachary Basu claimed. Like what? “[Donald] Trump, [Elon] Musk and other MAGA influencers have spread misinformation about water policies in California while downplaying the role of climate change in fostering historically dry conditions,” he wrote.

 

Readers are presented with two hyperlinks to substantiate the claim. The first, regarding “water policies in California,” takes readers to an Associated Press video in which reporter Melissa Goldin busts two myths — one being a left-wing supposition that water into Southern California had been throttled by an avaricious billionaire, presumably for his own perverse amusement. The second myth, however, surrounds the allegation that firefighters were forced to use “women’s handbags” to douse the flames. “However, it has been confirmed that the supposed handbags were actually canvas bags used by the Los Angeles Fire Department to fight small fires,” Goldin observed.

 

Reasonable enough, although we might quibble over just how “small” the conflagration that consumed multiple Manhattans’ worth of Los Angeles acreage was. Still, these collapsible water buckets are optimal in certain circumstances. That explanation does not, however, tell us how Trump and Musk were implicated in promulgating that false assumption. The hunt continues.

 

If you haven’t given up by this point, you might encounter this brain poison: “Los Angeles fires are part of a larger globalist plot to wage economic warfare [and] deindustrialize the Untied [sic] States before triggering total collapse,” declared the professional conspiracy theorist Alex Jones. To this madness, Musk wrote simply, “True.”

 

Quite unlike his conduct as a businessman, Musk is a reckless communicator. He often seems allergic to exercising elementary discretion when operating on the social media platform he owns. But it’s not clear that Musk himself promoted the “handbag” claim. Perhaps those “other MAGA influencers” are doing the work here.

 

And if those influencers were attempting to make the point that public-policy priorities come with trade-offs — that any commitment of resources comes at the expense of time and energy that will not be devoted to other priorities — team MAGA has an undeniable point. It is not disinformation to note that the LAFD is among the most “understaffed” big-city fire departments in America, that its budget was cut amid dire warnings about the city’s readiness to fight future fires, and that the institution devoted itself to solving supposed problems like too few women volunteering (or even wanting to serve) as firefighters. By fixating on the “handbags,” they made a good point as poorly as possible, thereby giving their opponents the chance to point and laugh.

 

Axios’s Basu directs readers in his second hyperlink directly to Musk’s X account, where he is alleged to have been “downplaying the role of climate change in fostering historically dry conditions.” That’s an odd interpretation of a social media post that begins, “Climate change risk is real,” although its effects are “slower than alarmists claim.” Indeed, Musk’s offense here seems to be his indictment of “bad governance at the state and local level that resulted in a shortage of water” and his tacit endorsement of a Trump statement that did the same.

 

Here, too, we encounter the problem of laziness. “Governor Gavin Newscum refused to sign the water restoration declaration put before him that would have allowed millions of gallons of water, from excess rain and snow melt from the North, to flow daily into many parts of California,” Trump wrote in a lengthy missive on his propriety social media venue, Truth Social, “including the areas that are currently burning in a virtually apocalyptic way.” Why? “He wanted to protect an essentially worthless fish called a smelt,” Trump added, “by giving it less water (it didn’t work!).”

 

Trump’s post provided Governor Gavin Newsom with the chance to sneer at his detractor. “There is no such document as the water restoration declaration,” he snarked. “That is pure fiction.”

 

Newsom seems to be right; the document doesn’t exist. And yet, the point Trump made was not wrong. Citing reporting in the California-based outlet the Desert Sun, Newsweek’s reporters noted that “Trump signed new federal regulations” in 2019 “allowing water to flow from Northern California into the Central Valley.” Newsom’s office directed his attorney general to sue the feds to prevent Trump’s order from going into effect, citing the threat to smelt and salmon populations. “California has a sovereign and statutorily mandated interest in protecting species and their habitat within the state from harm,” wrote Newsom’s attorney general at the time and now Joe Biden’s health and human services secretary, Xavier Becerra.

 

Trump’s rather loose command of the supporting facts doesn’t undermine the accuracy of his overall point, but it does give his critics license to mock him and revel in their own sense of superiority. Moreover, it compels his Republican defenders to clean up after Trump’s sloppy language when they should be on the offense.

 

Republicans are inclined to see this dynamic as a media problem. The press just cannot decipher Trumpian rhetorical maximalism and see through the posturing to the nucleus of truth in his remarks. Still, the notion that we should expect either accuracy or sophistication from the president, but not both, is a false choice. Those of us who take policy seriously and are invested in political outcomes should demand better from the stewards of our ideological project — not to please the press but to deprive them of opportunities to sneer and mock the Right’s valid observations. It’s the least we should expect.