A Trumpian Farm Policy
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Someone pointed this story out in comments yesterday and we will see a lot more of this kind of thing. Sure, Trump is going to force we farmers to die of thirst this summer so he could seem like a big man in January. And sure we might lose our farms. But at least we feel so white!
California farmers — some of President Donald Trump’s staunchest supporters in the deep blue state — are sticking with him, even after he wasted their water.
At least publicly, the farmers and their Republican allies are brushing off the president’s abrupt move last week to dump more than 2 billion gallons of their irrigation water from reservoirs in the name of aiding Los Angeles wildfires — even though the fires were already contained and the water couldn’t have made it to Los Angeles anyway.
Zack Stuller, a farmer with citrus and almond orchards he irrigates from the reservoirs and president of the Tulare County Farm Bureau in the state’s arid Central Valley, said the situation “definitely was a little nerve-wracking for a while.”
But, he said, “I’m a farmer. I have a conservative mindset. I encourage the trigger-pulling attitude, like, ‘Hey, let’s just get stuff done.’”
The episode is one of the most visceral examples of a recurring theme for Trump and his most loyal supporters who’ve stuck with him through sweeping actions in the first weeks of his presidency that could hurt their bottom lines, be it the deportation of workers or expensive tariffs.
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Local officials scrambled in calls to their Republican congressmembers and others in Trump’s orbit, who successfully talked the White House down, according to Victor Hernandez, who oversees water management on one of the rivers, the Kaweah River.
Now, some of those same players are trying to look on the bright side.
“We’re excited that we have a president that’s engaged in California water policy and maximizing the coordination of the systems,” Rep. Vince Fong, a GOP representative whose district includes the affected farmers, said in a brief interview Wednesday.
The debacle is especially ironic because dumping California farmers’ water is the very thing Trump has been attacking Newsom over for years, exploiting a deep partisan vein that separates the Central Valley from the Democrat-dominated coast. He picked up their refrain in 2016, echoing the bitter signs that still dot the I-5 targeting Democratic politicians for causing water shortages, remnants of the water wars of the 1990s that inflamed the state’s fish-versus-farms dynamic.
But hey, at least some trans kid isn’t playing women’s volleyball.