Rachel Maddow Mocks Trump’s Understanding Of How Water Flows On Land: ‘He Thinks… That North Is Also Up’
Pod Save America host Jon Favreau spoke to Rachel Maddow over the weekend and at one point asked her if anything from President Donald Trump’s first week in office of his second term particularly stunned her.
“Has there been a moment where it’s like hit you personally, where you’re just watching it? You’re like, oh, yeah, this is going to we’re going to be doing this for four more years now?” asked Favreau, a former Obama aide.
“You know what it was? It was the, in the flurry of first couple days of actions, there was the stuff about water in California that Trump started sort of elaborating on it. There was an executive action about it, but then he also started talking about it, about how we need, we need to turn the valve,” Maddow replied.
“Yeah, there is a valve in Northern California that if you just turn it, we will get water in Los Angeles,” Favreau added.
“He thinks, I think that North is also up and that up, there’s a water tower, like it’s a New York building. And if you just turn the valve, then down gets the water. And in the campaign, you might remember him riffing a lot on the difficulty of washing his hair and how many times he has to flush the toilet to make what’s in the toilet go down the toilet,” Maddow added.
“And I was realizing like, oh, we’re gonna get the plumbing stuff again,” Maddow joked.
Trump made headlines this week as well when he posted to Truth Social, “The United States Military just entered the Great State of California and, under Emergency Powers, TURNED ON THE WATER flowing abundantly from the Pacific Northwest, and beyond. The days of putting a Fake Environmental argument, over the PEOPLE, are OVER. Enjoy the water, California!!!”
California officials quickly debunked the claim, as did Trump’s own department of defense. Fox News’s Jennifer Griffin reported on Tuesday morning, “US defense officials tell me they did not send troops to “turn on the water” in California, despite President Trump’s claims overnight.”
California Governor Gavin Newsom (D) has been working to debunk misinformation from Trump since the fires in Los Angeles began. “Broadly, there is no water shortage in Southern California right now, despite Trump’s claims that he would open some imaginary spigot,” he wrote on a fact-checking website, adding:
Orange County Water District, which supplies groundwater to the north half of the county, has enough supply to carry its 2.5 million customers through the worst of any potential droughts for 3 to 5 years. The Metropolitan Water District of Southern California also has an abundance, with a record 3.8 million acre-feet of water in storage. That’s enough water to supply 40 million people for a year.
Additionally, to Maddow’s point, water and rivers do not necessarily flow north to south as they follow the topography of the land instead. And while it is certainly true that some of Southern California’s water comes from the northern part of the state it also comes in from other directions – like from the Colorado River Aqueduct which flows in from the east.
Watch the full clip above.
