Illustration: HuffPost; Photos: Getty

WASHINGTON ― Exactly 10 days after taking the presidential oath of office early this year, Donald Trump nearly drowned dozens, potentially hundreds, of his own citizens in California’s Central Valley.

Trump, unilaterally, decided he would solve Los Angeles’ wildfire problem by “opening up” taps to let billions of gallons of water being stored in two reservoirs in the Sierra Nevada foothills flow into Southern California.

“Photo of beautiful water flow that I just opened in California. Today, 1.6 billion gallons and, in 3 days, it will be 5.2 billion gallons,” he bragged on social media, along with a photo of water flowing in a stream. “Everybody should be happy about this long fought Victory! I only wish they listened to me six years ago – There would have been no fire!”

Except not a single drop of those billions of gallons could possibly have made it to Los Angeles or anywhere even close. They would have, however, overflowed the banks of rivers leading out of Lake Kaweah and Success Lake, threatening residents in communities on their shores.

“It was clearly nothing but a poor publicity stunt. And it was a dangerous one,” California Democratic Sen. Alex Padilla said at the time. “An unexpected, non-noticed release threatens lives, threatens the safety of communities if you flood somewhere without the proper coordination.”

Disaster, quite possibly including drowned residents, was averted thanks to quick action by local water management officials who talked the Army Corps of Engineers down from carrying out Trump’s order to open the floodgates on the two dams to maximum capacity and persuaded them to release a lesser amount instead.

That, however, did not stop Trump from continuing to boast about his decision, adding in the hydrologically impossible claim that the water in question had originated in Canada. “The water comes down from the northwest parts of Canada, I guess, and ― but the Pacific Northwest and it comes down by millions and millions of barrels a day. And I opened it up,” he said at the National Prayer Breakfast on February 6.

“Thank you very much, Canada, we appreciate it,” he said at an Oval Office photo opportunity two months later. “They had all that water pouring out right into the Pacific. They had a big valve, like a giant valve as big as this room and they turned the valve. Takes one day to turn it.”

University of Michigan psychology professor David Dunning, one of the co-discoverers of the “Dunning-Kruger effect” that describes how some people with little competence in any specific field nevertheless overestimate their level of expertise, said he was hard-pressed to explain Trump’s belief that water from Canada somehow flows to California, except for their relative placement on a standard map of North America.

“People take things they know and misapply them,” Dunning said. “In his case, north is up and south is down, and I’m guessing here, because water flows down, if he opens up the tap, water will flow down from Canada to irrigate the crops in California.”

White House aides did not respond to queries about Trump’s decision that wasted billions of gallons of water or, for that matter, any other issues for this story.

Whatever Trump’s actual thought process, the episode offers just one example of Trump’s failure to understand a problem but a willingness to nevertheless make a decision based on a conspiracy theory he has heard about, the uninformed speculation of one of his country club members or even just a whim grounded in nothing more than supreme confidence in his own “gut instinct.”

These decisions are distinct from policies his administration has pursued in his second term that are long-standing aspirations of the Republican Party and its dominant wing that Trump seized control of a decade ago. Striking Iranian nuclear sites, deploying ICE en masse across the country, cutting Medicaid, extending and deepening tax cuts, defunding the Corporation for Public Broadcasting — all of these things might have happened under any Republican president, particularly one who rode to power on anti-establishment, anti-elite populism.

A host of other Trump decisions, though, do not spring from well-developed or even hastily dashed-off ideologies. There is no conservative think tank, for example, churning out white papers proposing to end wildfires by dumping water into the ground 200 miles away. They result from the nation’s 47th president believing something comically incorrect and clinging to it in the face of all evidence to the contrary.

They happen because the president is astonishingly ignorant — in the words of one of his top advisers in the first term, “a moron.”

Some of these beliefs, such as the insistence that sea-level rise will somehow create more oceanfront property, have little real-world impact. Others have had major consequences. Trump’s certainty that other countries pay tariff revenue to the United States has created a drag on the US and global economies, spiking prices for consumers and battering domestic farmers and manufacturers.

That he is willing to go to the mat for patently incorrect ideas in this second term, of course, should come as little surprise. In his first term, he embellished a hurricane tracking map with his magic marker, making it appear that cities in Alabama were in the storm’s path. It led to alarmed calls and forced the local National Weather Service office to issue a statement that there was no threat.

Most famously, he once extrapolated from a scientist’s finding that ordinary disinfectants killed the Covid-19 pathogen on hard surfaces to suggest that people could inject it into their bodies to eliminate the virus. Makers of Clorox and other products rushed out statements warning against ingesting them.

“I’ve never met anyone else remotely like him,” said Charles........

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