Trump suggests Californians can rake their forests to prevent wildfires. (He is wrong.)

[Yo_Mama_Been_Loggin]

Reversing course on his threat to cut the state’s federal funding if Californians don’t solve their forest fire problem, President Trump now says he’ll solve it with them.

“We go through this every year; we can’t go through this,” Trump said Saturday as he toured the state’s massive wildfire zones. “We’re going to have safe forests.”

How to make California’s vast drought-stricken forests “safe” after the Camp Fire grew to the size of Chicago this month, killing dozens if not hundreds of people and burning an entire town to the ground? Trump promised federal funds and says he has some ideas.

One of those ideas is raking.

It’s not a popular idea.

“You’ve got to take care of the floors. You know the floors of the forests, it’s very important,” Trump told reporters as he posed with California officials in the charred ruins of Paradise — his first stop on the tour.

Trump went on to explain that the president of Finland, whom he met on an overseas trip a week earlier, told him about raking the forest floors. “He called it a forest nation,” Trump said, “and they spent a lot of time on raking and cleaning and doing things, and they don’t have any problem."

Finnish President Sauli Niinisto later disputed this. He told a local newspaper that he had briefed Trump on Finland’s efforts to surveil and care for its forests, the Associated Press wrote, “but said he can’t recall anything being mentioned on raking.”

-snip-

The online reaction in Finland alternated between those pointing out that the country has a vastly different climate and population density and those making jokes.

The idea’s domestic reception wasn’t much better.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/factcheck/trump-suggests-californians-can-rake-their-forests-to-prevent-wildfires-he-is-wrong/ar-BBPPWxj?li=BBnb7Kz

[jberryhill]

1. They're having a blast with this one in Finland

Link to tweet

[Kaleva]

2. I come from a long line of forest floor rakers.

[imanamerican63]

3. And all he has to worry about is raking his hair on a rainy day?

[Guppy]

4. I bet this guy has never hiked

in his life.

[Denzil_DC]

5. Trumped originally claimed it was a state governor who talked to him about "raking".

This was in a Fox News interview in Friday afternoon. Conveniently, he refused to name the governor:

The big problem we have is management. When I was in a certain state, I won’t say which, the governor said, ‘You know, we’ve tested it. We clean out areas and we actually set the fire just to see, we lose almost nothing, we can put it out right away.’

https://deadline.com/2018/11/donald-trump-blames-management-california-wildfires-saturday-visit-chris-wallace-interview-1202503854/

It was only when he was on camera in CA that he decided it was the Finnish president.

So either he's so gaga by this point he can't remember who he talked to, or he can't recall what lie he told a day or so ago.

From the same article and interview, it also looks like the "raking" thing came from his misunderstanding of what he saw firefighters doing on TV:

I was watching the firemen the other day and they were raking areas, they were raking areas where the fire was right over there,” he complained. “And they’re raking trees, little trees like this that are not trees, little bushes that you could see are totally dry. Weeds. And they’re raking them, they’re on fire. That should have been all raked out. You wouldn’t have the fires.”

No doubt short of ideas and anything meaningful to say, he fixated on this, and combined it with his genius idea that forests need to be managed, which I'm sure was a revelation to all concerned.