What does a 3-inch-long, nearly extinct fish native to California’s Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta have to do with fighting California wildfires? Nothing, apart from a need for water.
That hasn’t stopped President Donald Trump from taking aim yet again at the endangered delta smelt as he threatens to withhold federal aid from victims of the Los Angeles-area firestorm and attempts to roll back major environmental regulations.
Since his inauguration Monday, Trump has blamed fish protections for the gaps in water access that supposedly fueled the devastating Palisades fire. If California were to only open up the giant spigot from the delta to Southern California, he said, all would be fine.
After blaming Gov. Gavin Newsom for depriving the region of water to protect the “worthless” fish in a Truth Social post Monday, he repeated the sentiment in an interview with Sean Hannity this week.
Trump’s reasoning defies logic.
Los Angeles reservoirs are currently flush with supplies from both the Delta and the Colorado River; endangered species protections take up an extremely small fraction of water supply for farms and cities; and the Palisades suffered from a lack of municipal planning.
“The only thing fishy are Trump’s facts,” Newsom replied in post on X.
But the fixation on a tiny fish is less about facts and more about the politics of “us versus them,” said Caleb Scoville, a sociology professor at Tufts University writing on a book about the politics of the delta smelt.
Trump has made clear his intention to “drill, baby, drill” and pull the U.S. out of the world’s fight against climate change. By pitting California and Newsom as eager to hurt communities and private industry to protect a tiny fish, he makes the state a political enemy.
“It doesn’t matter that it’s not factually accurate because that’s not what it’s really about,” he said. “The story he’s telling fits his political intuitions. … This lets him put Gavin Newsom on the defensive. And it aligns with his broader anti-environmental agenda.”
Followers of California water politics have long known the delta smelt as a key indicator species for the health of a fragile ecosystem. The fish started to become controversial in the 1980s when it was up for consideration to be listed under the Endangered Species Act.
But wasn’t until Hannity talked at length about the smelt in an episode on his show in 2009 that the fish was brought into the national public sphere, said Scoville, “when the fish escaped the world of California water” and became a culture war symbol.
The show aired during the Great Recession and early days of the Obama administration. The conservative television host framed environmental protection for the smelt as big government gone wrong in California and everything wrong with liberalism. It stuck.
In 2019, Trump revised federal water rules to increase deliveries to Central Valley agriculture, a move seen as a direct challenge to those protections. Again on Monday, Trump directed federal agencies to pump more water from the Delta south to farms and cities in an order called “Putting People Over Fish.”
Now, when Trump and other Republican figures talk about the delta smelt, it’s “completely disconnected from how it actually matters,” said Scoville. “I don’t know if this controversy will ever die, but it looks as though it will outlive the species itself.”
Most of California’s population receives water through the state and federal water projects, which transport supplies from Sierra Nevada snowmelt into the Delta and out through aqueducts, reservoirs and pipelines.
Agricultural industry leaders in the San Joaquin Valley often blame insufficient supplies on environmental regulations that prioritize habitat protections for endangered species like the delta smelt, salmon, steelhead trout and sturgeon — especially during drought.
The demands of California’s agriculture and population growth have had severe consequences for native fish species since the early 20th century. As recently as the 1950s, delta smelt were fished for food, said Jon Rosenfield, science director at the environmental watchdog San Francisco Baykeeper. Then it became an essential part of the Delta ecosystem, supporting other mammals, birds and fish.
Newsom’s own rules haven’t helped the beleaguered estuary and its fish, he said, because the governor recently waived environmental rules under the Clean Water Act and Endangered Species act that have allowed more water to be exported south.
“This has all come at a great cost to the Bay Delta ecosystem for native fish,” said Rosenfield, calling Trump’s words gobbledygook. “Increasing water exports above the levels we have now would not result in much more water getting to Southern California anyway.
With the delta smelt hardly around to take a beating, said Felicia Marcus, former chair of the State Water Resources Control Board, the biggest loser in Trump’s fixation on the fish is the discourse.
As climate change makes California’s already moody swings between wet and dry more ferocious, the state’s water problems between farmers, environmentalists and cities are getting harder to solve.
“It makes it so much harder for reasonable people in every stakeholder group to have a rational conversation,” said Marcus. “It’s a distraction from the hard work of figuring out how to balance all of the needs, not just picking winners and losers.”
