By IRIE SENTNER, SOPHIA CAI and BEN JOHANSEN
Move over, GAVIN NEWSOM. President DONALD TRUMP has another California nemesis — and it’s a three-inch-long endangered fish.
The president, who is en route to Los Angeles Friday afternoon to survey the city’s wildfire damage as part of the first domestic trip of his second term, has consistently blamed the fires’ sweeping devastation on the blue state’s Democratic governor and progressive policies.
But he’s also trained his ire on the delta smelt — a silver, minnow-like fish he says is impeding state officials from releasing water from the north to extinguish the flames in the south.
“They have all this water, and it’s really good water, up high … and they’re restricting it,” Trump told reporters Tuesday. California’s pipes, the president said, “are bone dry” — and it’s all “to protect the delta smelt, it’s a fish doing poorly anyway. How are you protecting the delta smelt by not giving it water? It’s a fish. It needs water. Nobody can answer that question.”
Setting aside Trump’s scientifically-challenged analysis for a moment, it’s not the first time the president has gone after the fish. Earlier this month, Trump slammed Newsom on Truth Social for refusing “to sign the water restoration declaration put before him” in order to “protect an essentially worthless fish called a smelt, by giving it less water (it didn’t work!).”
In fact, the president’s vendetta against the smelt goes back nearly a decade, our JENNIFER YACHNIN reported in September. Trump started slamming the “three-inch fish” as early as May 2016 in a speech to farmers in central California during the 2016 primary.
The beef can be traced back to former Rep. DEVIN NUNES (R-Calif.), who has railed against the “stupid little fish” for even longer — since at least 2014. Trump and Nunes spoke about the smelt “right at the beginning, before I got elected,” the president revealed during his first term. Since then, Trump has attacked the smelt in public remarks and interviews at least a dozen times, returning to the talking point during all three of his presidential campaigns.
As part of his flurry of executive actions on Monday, Trump issued a memorandum directing the Commerce and Interior secretaries to route more water from the north to the south of the state. That memo, titled “Putting People over Fish: Stopping Radical Environmentalism to Provide Water to Southern California,” explicitly blamed the smelt and other fish species for a successful federal lawsuit Newsom brought against the Trump administration in his first term to limit the flow of water from California’s northern Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta to the state’s Central Valley.
The smelt — which is nearly extinct and endemic to the Delta — can’t hit back. But Newsom’s press office did, writing Tuesday on X: “The only thing fishy are Trump’s facts.”
“Management of the state water project has nothing to do with the supply of water for fighting fires in Southern California,” Newsom spokesperson BOB SALLADAY said in a statement to West Wing Playbook. “In fact, all of the reservoirs in Southern California were full at the time of the fire.”
Trump’s core issue with the smelt — at least as it relates to the fires — appears to be a misunderstanding of what went wrong in Los Angeles when the hydrants went dry.
“They didn’t let the water flow, and they still haven’t for whatever reason,” the president told reporters earlier today before departing the White House. That reason, Trump has said again and again, has to do with protecting the smelt.
But “Southern California has water. There’s no water supply problem down there at all” when it comes to fighting the fires, said LETITIA GRENIER, director of the Water Policy Center at the independent Public Policy Institute of California. The real issue, Grenier explained, was that the water lines lost pressure — “an infrastructure limitation,” not a supply problem.
The state does have rules in place to leave enough water in rivers to maintain the dwindling populations of smelt and other threatened species, Grenier said, and those regulations do affect how much water can flow to the thirsty, drought-stricken population centers of Los Angeles and San Diego.
But, Grenier emphasized, “The fish doesn’t have anything to do with limiting water for the Southern California fires.”
A White House spokesperson did not respond to a request for comment.
Later today, Trump is set to tour the Pacific Palisades and receive an emergency briefing, where he’ll be joined by the Democratic Los Angeles Mayor KAREN BASS and a bipartisan group of House members from California, per our MEGAN MESSERLY. Newsom, who invited Trump to California earlier this month, isn’t on that list — though he got last-minute outreach from the White House and, in coordination with Trump’s team, will appear on the airport tarmac for a greeting (and possible pull-side) with Trump, our CHRISTOPHER CADELAGO reports.
The smelt wasn’t on Trump’s invite list either. But Grenier thinks the fish is getting too much attention, anyway.
“I don’t know why there’s a focus on the delta smelts in particular,” she said, noting that some other endangered species, like Chinook salmon and steelhead trout, also factor into the regulations. “Maybe because they’re not as charismatic.”
First posted on Politico
