CNN’s Daniel Dale Says Trump’s Claims About L.A. Wildfires Have ‘A Staggering Quantity of Wrongness’

PHILLIP: “Tonight, anger and a search for where to put it. Los Angelenos are fighting through the worst days of their lives, and they’re trying to figure out who to point the finger at to explain this gut-punch loss that they are wading through right now. President-Elect Donald Trump is faulting the governor, Gavin Newsom.”

[Clip starts]
Trump: “Gavin Newsom had an opportunity to have millions of gallons a week, a day, millions and millions of gallons come down from the north. And I was able to get him federal approval foe that, from, actually, from the Department of Commerce, of all departments. I didn’t realize it would go through Commerce. I would have thought Environmental, but it goes through Commerce. I got all of the approvals and he said, ‘I don’t want to sign it. I don’t want the water.’”
[Clip ends]

PHILLIP: “CNN’s Daniel Dale is joining us for a fact-check of some of this. So, Daniel, can you tell us about what Trump said there? Is it true?”
Dale: “I showed a social media post from the president-elect yesterday to an expert in California water policy, a man named Jeffrey Mount. He said, Abby, None of it is true. So, this has just been a staggering quantity of wrongness from the president-elect in a very short period of time. And there have been some small specific examples. Like, he keeps saying that Governor Newsom refused to sign a so-called Water Restoration Declaration. In fact, no such declaration even exists, as Newsom’s office has pointed out. He also said yesterday that they’re not using firefighting planes. We’ve seen those planes, they’re there. But more than that, Abby, I think the president-elect has promoted an overarching false narrative, you heard a bit of it there, that this — the challenges we’re seeing in the firefighting effort have something to do with a long-running policy battle about how much water should be kept in the north of the state to protect fish species, like the delta smelt and other environmental ecosystems, and how much should be sent to the south to help agricultural interests, farmers, in an area called the Central Valley. Now, two water policy experts in California told me emphatically yesterday, None of this has anything to do with each other. There is simply no connection between the protection of that smelt fish in that estuary, in the delta in the north, and what we’re seeing in the south for a number of reasons. But number one, there is no shortage of water in the Los Angeles area. The reservoirs are at or above historical levels. The water is there. Now, we have seen high-profile issues in one part of the city, Pacific Palisades, where some hydrants were dry or did not have a lot of water, but that was not because there was not enough water in the region. That was because of technical, logistical infrastructure issues related to the hilly, mountainous terrain and the location where water tanks have been situated. So, the idea that not enough water has been sent down from the north and instead has been, you know, protecting a little fish there, and that’s why we’re seeing these fires be hard to contain, simply does not bear out at all.”
PHILLIP: “That’s really important information there, Daniel. One other thing, you know, Trump is talking about President Biden not leaving him any money with FEMA to deal with these wildfires. What are the facts around that?”
Dale: “It’s just not true. We heard this from Trump after Hurricane Helene in the fall. It wasn’t true then and it’s not true now. Now, it is true that FEMA’s disaster relief fund was severely depleted by the number of disasters last year. But critically, Abby, it was replenished by the disaster relief supplemental bill that President Biden signed in December. I spoke to FEMA yesterday. They told me that there is approximately $27 billion today in that disaster relief fund, plus billions of dollars of additional disaster related funding they have in other pockets of money. Now, it is true that that $27 billion might well not be enough to cover the needs produced by every disaster we unfortunately end up seeing over the rest of 2025, but $27 billion is simply not no money, which is what Trump said yesterday.”
PHILLIP: “Yeah.”