What in God's name is Trump talking about here?
This is beyond weird. It's hallucinatory. And even if it were somehow true that the Army TURNED ON THE WATER, California doesn't get any water from the Pacific Northwest or beyond. We get it from our very own Sierra Nevadas.
Is Trump really and truly losing it? Or does he figure he can just say anything he wants for the rubes? Or what?
Rubes . …. 50 bucks sez there are a lot of people who really believe that Cali just refused to turn on the giant faucet.
Maggots are dumb.
What does a city in Colombia have to do with water in California? …
They're both on the left coast?
"50 bucks sez there are a lot of people who really believe that Cali just refused to turn on the giant faucet."
I'm definitely not taking that bet. But that doesn't mean he's intentionally playing them. Given Kevin's choice, I'll vote for"Trump really and truly losing it." (Of course, as others have pointed out, it could be both.)
Yeah. They seem to think you can just turn on the rain somehow?
I sure hope the MSM doesn’t just gloss this shit over. It is nuts on so many levels. He has clearly lost it.
Foxnews:
https://www.foxnews.com/politics/trumps-claims-military-entered-california-release-water-flow-state-says-did-not-happen
OMG Fox turned this into a both sides ... without any sense of what is reality? This is where we are. You don't have to ignore insanity and the pronouncements of dear leader get covereage with no downside, no matter what.
That's how journalism works, right? Interview one person who says the sun rose this morning, interview one who said it didn't, and report the controversy without bothering to look up.
If Fox news has something about it, then good for them. Because I just looked at the web sites of CNN, The NYT the Post, and various others, and have seen nothing. California announced that the Feds restarted some pumps that were down for maintenance. This is no explanation for his announcement at all. His announcement was lunatic.
The U.S. military did not “enter California”. The are dozens of military bases in California. What does “enter” mean here?
What “emergency powers” is he talking about?
What water was “turned on” and by whom? Is he saying some kind of military force was used to accomplish this?
California doesn’t get water from Oregon, Washington or Canada and there is no infrastructure to do this or any plans to do it. It would be an enormous undertaking. WTF!
"Because I just looked at the web sites of CNN, The NYT the Post, and various others, and have seen nothing."
I was reading earlier about what happens when institutions lie, and this is one way institutions do it. They lie by omission. News outlets ignore evidence that our president is insane. It's been going on for ten years now. Trump could walk stark naked down Fifth Avenue and they wouldn't report it. Except occasionally they might say, "Oh, what a fine suit of clothes."
It's not that the news is incapable of critical coverage of our leaders. Hillary once slipped on a curb and Joe once mixed up Egypt and Mexico. Those were major scandals.
Speaking of lies...
Jim Acosta today, on leaving CNN:
https://bsky.app/profile/atrupar.com/post/3lgstau3l322d
"It is never a good time to bow down to a tyrant.... One final message. Don't give in to the lies. Don't give in to the fear. Hold on to the truth. And to hope."
Kudos.
I read this as fox explicitly acknowledging Trump was bat sh t crazy.
A both sides take from Fox is actually surprisingly good from them. I would have expected a fawning piece on how Daddy swooped in and in a single master stroke solved the complexities of water management that has vexed California for approximately ever.
Will nobody think of the smelt? Apparently not.
I really don't understand Americans. I observed in 2016 that Trump was very obviously off his head. I've made the same observation countless times since. Yet here we are in the year of our Lord 2025, and an intelligent man like Kevin asks in bewilderment "Is Trump really and truly losing it?"
No, Kevin. If he ever had it, he lost it a long long time ago.
amen.
There is a logic to what Trump's doing and I think he's aware of it and doing it very much on purpose. It's a transparent and easily disprovable lie. But it will be reported on propaganda outlets like Fox New and having a basis in truth and people will be expected to accept that it is true. Essentially, by keeping quiet about crazy things that Trump says, the legacy media is submitting to Trump
Fox reported it as a lie. The rest of media ignored it.
The interesting thing about Trump's relationship to reality is that he genuinely doesn't care about it.
If he can make his own reality, he's very happy to do it, and as long as people are praising him, the relationship between his swashbuckling accomplishments and actual reality is totally immaterial.
The hope is that most of his, ahem, accomplishments can be accomplished with as little damage to our actual reality as possible over the next four years.
+1
I agree, but I would put it even more strongly. It's not whether he cares about his relationship to reality. In his mind, what he wants to be true IS true, and that's the only reality there is.
(For those with a philosophical turn of mind, it's like the Pragmatic Theory of Truth on steroids, except instead of steroids it's on LSD.)
the damaging has already started. it seems not too many "adults" are don't care too much.
...does he figure he can just say anything he wants for the rubes?
Yes. He's always thought this and it's largely true.
Is Trump really and truly losing it?
Yes. This is also true. Two things can be fucking true, Kevin!
Nice combination in a guy with the launch codes*: an inveterate, lying sack of shit who lies so much he clearly has trouble sorting reality from fantasy coupled with rapid cognitive decline.
*Hey, but at least we can all take comfort in the prudent, sober leadership at the Pentagon. It's all about guard rails!
Our president is insane.
1+++
It's Mad King Ludwig von Trump.
Wait till he starts building castles.
I'd love it if he spent his time building castles. Maybe someone could suggest this idea to him?
On of his executive orders was that all US government buildings should be classical greek or roman in origin.
+1
A sand castle on the seashore where the tide is rising. Merde á Lardo would do I think
Love it. This explosion of chaos and insanity, wow. 🤯🤡
If only he weren't signing whatever garbage his Heritage Foundation/Project 2025 thugs are putting in front of him.
The way I see it, the more they show what POTUS can do, then the more a Democrat can do, too, as well as undo that which comes by way of Executive Order.
The chaos has to occur for people to understand what their vote cost them.
Sadly, there will never be another Democrat in the White House.
Every time the convicted felon Trump does or says these crazy things, he withdraws a little bit of political capital and goodwill. The faster he withdraws his political capital, the faster his administration will collapse.
I don’t know; his cult has overlooked about a zillion things that would normally end a politician’s career. I think they would drink the Kool-Aid knowing full well what was in it.
Undampened oscillation is not a good thing here…
Your presumption that there will be elections is cute.
There probably will be elections, like there are in Russia, Iran, Belarus etc. All he needs is to intimidate or kill all serious opponents.
Wild that you think the Democrats can both learn a lesson and wield power in a way that would actually make things better. I would have thought Biden and his futility fetish during the last 4 years would have made it clear that Democrats are more interested in constraining themselves by rules that only they follow than doing literally anything to help people or actually win elections.
Sadly true.
Literally anything, you say, waving your hands with no evidence. Fuck those kids getting access to schools, poor kids getting meals, etc.
Your voice is that of a Republican enabler. You don't say what could be done, or recognize what has been done, and you ignore what Republicans did to block things.
Everything is Murc's law and green lantern fallacy. 'only Democrats have agency' and 'if only the President magically did things'.
The tweet is an example of Trump literally doing nothing and claiming it happened. This is the opposite of what you're saying Biden should have done! So even if he did exactly what Trump did here, you'd still be whining.
So you're not serious. You're just enabling Republicans by creating nihilism.
Well said. Biden accomplished more than most of us expected, given the 60-vote hurdle in the already undemocratic Senate. He was just bad at getting it into the news. Read the Heather Cox Richardson Substack that Citizen99 cited in a comment to KD’s previous post. The drop in unauthorized border crossings under Biden/Harris was due to diplomatically-negotiated agreements with other countries in North, Central and South America. Of course, TFM disparages that because it doesn’t show ‘toughness’. And it doesn’t fit his zero-sum worldview.
+1
Biden had higher gdp growth than every republican president since 1928 except Regan and all time record for job growth. He did a great job but failed miserably at selling that greatness.
1+
"then the more a Democrat can do, too,"
Unfortunately the chaos muppets have an asymmetric advantage: it is much, much easier to break something than it is to build it.
+1
Would it be too corny if I responded, "build back, better"?
Except Democrats will never do that.
Give some credit to the poor "oversubscribed" Colorado River, Kevin. It's trying its best to put out the fires, but doggone it, there just hasn't been enough snow in Colorado for avlong time.
It's not ALL "our Sierra Nevada".
That's not even the water system they were talking about!
Well, he should. Over 50% of Los Angeles' water comes from the Colorado River Aqueduct. The Colorado River Aqueduct is managed by the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California (MWD)
But Trump doesn't care about or want to know the facts about anything.
Irony, Crissa. It's a thing.
I tell you Trump and his cronies are way out over their skis at this point. I’ve stopped worrying now and I’m looking forward to the implosion of all this hubris. People are going to start to notice.
Will they? According my mom, Trump stood up to Columbia and they backed down in 6 minutes and now are going to take back all their drug cartel members that were in this country.
We all get very different 'news' these days.i am afraid the only people that are going to 'notice' is the 'choir' so to speak.
They'll definitely notice that eggs aren't getting cheaper. As for turning the federal government into an authoritarian cesspool of corruption and personal tool of Trump's mercurial ravings? Eh. Nobody gives a shit.
Google maps is going to use the “Gulf of America” name in its system. Hilarious. The next president should name some runoff from a toxic waste dump as the shit creek of trump!
On my google maps, everything is mislabeled or grossly misspelled anyway.
? Where?
Everywhere in the world. Missing first letters and sometimes in different languages.
...They're supposed to be in their native languages.
That means the device or browser you're viewing with doesn't have full modern UTF-16 fonts.
The next president should name some runoff from a toxic waste dump as the shit creek of trump!
Like this?
John Oliver Memorial Sewer Plant
isn't this how cult leaders consolidate power? Push your followers into ever-crazier expressions of fealty? The cognitive dissonance becomes so great that leaving the cult becomes impossible.
People leave cults all the time.
That's why cults are all so obsessed with recruitment.
Delusions of grandeur are part of his pathology. He's a psychopath. Really. Google and Meta and the Post are humoring his. He's a very sick puppy.
I am at a loss....even bat shit isn't that crazy...
With any other president at any other time, this shit would have triggered a 25th Amendment process. For Trump, it's just another day ending in Y. It's gonna be fun four years...
I’m sure J. D. Vance is holding out hope.
An account from the California authorities clarified what happened: federal pumps had been down for three days for routine maintenance and are now back on. That's what filtered through his diseased brain.
So as usual he's taking credit for doing something he didn't do. That's what it's always about. Either taking credit or deflecting blame.
+1
My theory with this BS is that Trump is going to deliver disaster aid to California for the fires, but first he has to make it appear as if he's forcing California to do something about the fires. It's for their own good, you see. The Cult 45 members will believe it.
Rule #1 for the Republican Party is that they never argue in good faith
Rule #2 for the Republican Party is gaslighting is the new fact checking
I'm afraid the cluelessness is even more fundamental. Consider:
"...TURNED ON THE WATER flowing abundantly from the Pacific Northwest, and beyond."
Based on this and similar earlier comments, I'm convinced -- no snark, no exaggeration -- that he truly believes that because water flows downhill, it automatically flows from north to south on a map. This is a six-year-old's understanding of why the Hudson and the Mississippi flow south.
Wait until he learns about the St. Johns River. It will blow his mind!
The Willamette flows north and the Columbia - well, in the Northwest - like most rives there, flow West.
At this point, I wouldn't be surprised in the least if Trump's staff is telling him they're implementing whatever nonsense he comes up with just to keep the man-child happy. Then he beams in the belief that he's doing a great job.
If it was me, I would not post links to Trump's stupid website. You can copy/paste the text or even just do a screenshot.
Agree that would be better.
Charitably, maybe the Corps of Engineers which I think is technically part of the Army did something.
Incite a mob to overthrow democracy > win all swing states in an election. Trump doesn’t care about your nerdy nay-saying. What he says is the truth and you just have to accept you’re living in his world now.
> Is Trump really and truly losing it? Or does he figure he can just say anything he wants for the rubes? <
Two things can both be true
This is the kernel of "truth". From the Fox News story linked to (above)
"The military did not enter California," the department [of water resources] said on X. "The federal government restarted federal water pumps after they were offline for maintenance for three days. State water supplies in Southern California remain plentiful."
So... every mundane thing the federal government does will be translated into fixing a non-existent problem. [Temporary] road closure on I-95 now open to traffic. Trump restores vital transportation corridor that connects the United States from Florida to Maine.
Can you honestly say the sun ever rose before he was born? Few people are that old and they're fading fast.
He's at war with everyone else. He thinks Taiwan is part of China because China told him it was.
He's confident his numbskulls will be thrilled with believing he's ordered an invasion of California to free them from tyranny and eventually Fox will go right along with it playing stock footage of American soldiers marching around victoriously.
What they need is to stage a prime time tv event of him unlocking and cranking a giant gold tap somewhere and showing the water gushing into a parched and desperate canal while he stands there proudly like he invented water.
As a SF giants fan I wish Trump would get upset about all the money the Dodgers management are giving to foreigners instead of spending it on local disaster relief. At the very least he could insist they spend it on American born (of American born parents of course) players even if they aren't as good.
What I assumed he was referring to was that he ordered the Army Corp of Engineers to cease working on some project they have ben working on for years that has some environmental nexus that someone claims impacted water flow.
But given that that was never mentioned even by sympathizers who lie to defend him with a bit more coherency, I now do not think that was the case.
This is what the US is now. Reality Show president guy ran on fictitious issues, anger and racism. Now he's governing on fictitious issues, anger and racism.
4 years of anger, outrage and Trumpian mythbuilding using made up stories. It won an election, why not keep it going?
The people demand it.
+1.
"Or does he figure he can just say anything he wants for the rubes?"Of course he can. Maggots are the stupidest and most worthless garbage on the planet and even more importantly, want to be lied to.