The former President’s plan to bring water to the California desert is, like a lot of his promises, a goofy pipe-dream.

In an apparent effort to address the pressing issue of California water shortages, Trump said the following: “You have millions of gallons of water pouring down from the north with the snow caps and Canada, and all pouring down and they have essentially a very large faucet. You turn the faucet and it takes one day to turn it, and it’s massive, it’s as big as the wall of that building right there behind you. You turn that, and all of that water aimlessly goes into the Pacific (Ocean), and if they turned it back, all of that water would come right down here and right into Los Angeles,” he said.

Amidst his weird, almost poetic rambling, the “very large faucet” Trump seems to have been referring to is the Columbia River. The Columbia runs from a lake in British Columbia, down through Oregon and eventually ends up in the Pacific Ocean. Trump’s apparent plan is to somehow divert water from the Columbia and get it all the way down to Los Angeles. However, scientific experts who have spoken to the press have noted that not only is there currently no way to divert the water from the Oregon River to southern California, but creating such a system would likely be prohibitively expensive and inefficient.

  • aesthelete@lemmy.world
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    3 months ago

    What can the news do? If they dig into it, he didn’t really make any hard claims to roast.

    They can quote him as saying there’s “a large faucet as big as perhaps this building and it takes a day to turn” and say there is no such faucet and move on with their day. That would be a much better thing than what they’ve been doing since 2015 which is this bullshit: trying to find a real life thing to attach his utterances to and then asking him if that was what he was referring to when he clearly wasn’t.

    His talent is getting other people to fill in the blanks with his absolutely moronic speeches. For a time, people were arguing that “injecting disinfectant” was a great idea, actually, and trying to find science to back that up. Then he walked it back as a joke because he realized everyone except the brain washed lunatics in the country thought he was an absolute idiot for saying that shit.

    (Detailed with a large amount of humor here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wkO4QAP5wPo)

    It’s not the news media’s job to make a blathering imbecile make sense, and they are doing great harm to the country by treating him this way.