Trump Blames Los Angeles Wildfires on Newsom and Delta Smelt

As apocalyptic scenes emerged from the climate change-induced fires raging across the Pacific Palisades, Pasadena and elsewhere in Los Angeles County, President Elect Donald Trump yesterday blasted California Governor Gavin Newsom on Truth Social for not signing a “water declaration” that would provide more water for Californians.

As he has done many times before because of his complete lack of knowledge about California water and fish populations, Trump blamed it all on the Delta Smelt when in reality the smelt has nothing to do with the current LA region wildfires or any other wildfires.

An initial estimate of the cost of the LA fires is between $52 billion and $57 billion, making it the most expensive fire event in history, according to AccuWeather Inc. 

Trump said Newsom “refused to sign the water restoration declaration put before him that would have allowed millions of gallons of water, from excess rain and snow melt from the North, to flow daily into many parts of California, including the areas that are currently burning in a virtually apocalyptic way. He wanted to protect an essentially worthless fish called a smelt, by giving it less water (it didn’t work!), but didn’t care about the people of California.”

The problem is that the “water restoration” declaration cited by Trump doesn’t exist.

Newsom's office sent the following statement to ABC10 to expose this lie:

“There is no such document as the water restoration declaration – that is pure fiction. The Governor is focused on protecting people, not playing politics, and making sure firefighters have all the resources they need.”

The second Big Lie in Trump’s statement is that the Delta Smelt is “an essentially worthless fish.”

Based on my experience as a journalist who has written more stories and done more research into the demise of the Delta smelt than any other journalist I’m aware of, the Delta Smelt is definitely not a “worthless fish.”

In fact, the Delta Smelt is a key indicator species that demonstrates the health of the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta, the largest estuary on the West Coast of the Americas. The 2 to 3 inch fish that smells like a cucumber is found only in the Delta. It was once the most abundant fish in the Delta, but now is functionally extinct in the wild. due to massive water exports to agribusiness and other factors, including invasive species, toxics and pollution, over the past several decades.

And despite Trump’s claim that Newsom is denying Californians water in order to protect the smelt, the state and federal governments under both Republican and Democratic administrations have done a terrible job of protecting the fish over the past three decades, despite the smelt’s listing as “endangered” under both the state and federal Endangered Species Acts. 

Zero smelt have been caught over the past six years in the California Department of Fish and Wildlife’s Midwater Trawl Survey, despite the stocking of thousands of hatchery-raised Delta Smelt in the Delta by a consortium of state and federal agencies for the past three years. 

In the summer of 2024 a weekly survey by the US Fish and Wildlife Service targeting Delta smelt caught only one smelt, despite the stocking of thousands of hatchery-raised smelt by the state and federal governments over the past few years. “A late April IEP juvenile fish survey (the 20-mm Survey) caught several juvenile Delta smelt in the same area,” noted fishery scientist Tom Cannon in his blog on the California Sportfishing Protection Alliance website: calsport.org/..

Meanwhile, the other pelagic species collected in the survey — striped bass, longfin smelt, Sacramento splittail and threadfin shad — continue their dramatic decline since 1967 when the State Water Project went into effect. Only the American shad shows a less precipitous decline.

Between 1967 and 2020, the state’s Fall Midwater Trawl abundance indices for striped bass, Delta smelt, longfin smelt, American shad, splittail and threadfin shad have declined by 99.7, 100, 99.96, 67.9, 100, and 95%, respectively, according to the California Sportfishing Protection Alliance.

The graphs in this CDFW memo graphically illustrate how dramatic the declines in fish populations have been over the years: nrm.dfg.ca.gov/…  

Unfortunately, the CDFW hasn’t posted the results of this year’s fall survey yet, but I will post the results as soon as they become available.  

The collapse of Delta Smelt and other pelagic fish populations is part of a larger ecosystem decline that includes Central Valley salmon populations.

The Sacramento River fall-run Chinook salmon population has been the driver of West Coast ocean salmon fisheries for decades. However, record low returns of salmon to Coleman National Fish Hatchery, largely due to failed state and federal water policies, have resulted in the fishery disaster.

Salmon fishing on California ocean and river waters was closed in 2024 and 2023 due to the collapse of Sacramento River and Klamath River salmon populations.

Meanwhile, endangered winter and spring-Chinook salmon populations are moving closer and closer to extinction. Spawner escapement of endangered Sacramento River Winter Chinook (SRWC) in 2023 was estimated to be only 2,447 adults and 54 jacks, according to Pacific Fishery Management Council data.

Butte Creek, once the stronghold of spring-run Chinook, saw a record low 100 fish return to spawn last year and an even lower number of fish this year. Only 51 spring Chinooks were reported in the Butte Creek snorkel count and “probably less than 25” in the carcass count in 2024, according to Allen Harthorn, executive director of Friends of Butte Creek.  

The total number of salmon returning to the Sacramento and Klamath rivers and their tributaries this year won’t be made public until the data is posted on the Pacific Fishery Management Council’s website in late February 2025 and released in a yet-to-be announced CDFW salmon fishery information meeting in preparation for the crafting of salmon seasons in March and April.

There is no doubt that the State Water Project (SWP) and Central Valley Project (CVP) Delta “death pumps” have been the biggest killers of salmon, steelhead, Sacramento splittail and other fish species in California for many decades, as I have documented in hundreds of articles in an array of publications.

Background on saving the Delta Smelt from the Center for Biological Diversity 

“The tiny delta smelt is one of the best indicators of environmental conditions in the San Francisco Bay-Delta, an ecologically important estuary that is a major hub for California's water system — and an ecosystem that is now rapidly unraveling. The “smeltdown in the Delta,” as the extinction trajectory of delta smelt is known, has left the once-abundant species in critical condition due to record-high water diversions, pollutants, and harmful nonnative species that thrive in the degraded Delta habitat.

“This smelt's catastrophic decline is a warning that we may lose other native Delta fish that have fallen to alarmingly low levels as well, such as longfin smelt, salmon, and sturgeon. In fact, the delta smelt is only one of 12 of the original 29 indigenous Delta fish species that have been eliminated entirely from the area or that are threatened with extinction. An extinction risk analysis in 2006 warned that the Delta smelt could go extinct within 20 years.

“In 2007, when too few smelt were found during surveys to even calculate fish numbers, it was clear that the species was nearing extinction. Because federal and state agencies are failing to address the ecological problems in the Delta — moving forward with plans for water diversions and storage projects that will increase threats and further degrade Delta habitat — the Center is working to ratchet up protections for this species. A Center petition spurred the California Fish and Game Commission to upgrade its state protection status from threatened to endangered; we've also sued the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to achieve uplisting on the federal level.

“The Delta habitat for delta smelt is polluted with often-lethal concentrations of herbicides and pesticides discharged and transported from California's Central Valley into the fish's estuary home. Toxic pulses of pesticides have been documented in the Delta during critical stages in fish development, and pesticides have been implicated in the recent collapse of the delta smelt population. The Center is challenging the Environmental Protection Agency's registration and authorization-for-use of 46 toxic pesticides in and upstream of habitats for San Francisco Bay Area endangered species, including the Delta smelt; we continue to monitor and oppose harmful chemical pesticide use in California through our Pesticides Reduction Campaign.”