Donald Trump: California’s Forest & Wildfire Management Is a ‘Disaster’

President Donald Trump blasted California officials on forest management during an Oval Office press conference on wildfires Tuesday.

Trump said that one leader of a “forest nation” once told him that their trees were “much more flammable than” those in California, but they do not have wildfire problems because they maintain the ground.

“For years, I’ve been meeting with heads of other countries, and they are forest countries… Austria and others, and they say, ‘We’re a forest nation. We live in a forest,’ and they don’t have forest fires,” Trump said, adding:

And in one case, he said, ‘You know, our trees are much more flammable than California, but we don’t have forest fires because we clean the floor. We sweep the floor of leaves, of dead debris, of trees that fall, because after 18 months, the tree is… like tinder wood, and it goes up. It virtually explodes.’

Trump said that such measures are not taken in California.

“Well, we don’t take the trees out. California is a disaster. What they’ve done in California, they don’t do anything,” he said. “And if you did, you wouldn’t, you almost would not have forest fires. And you could say, in theory, you shouldn’t have any forest fires.”

Trump, flanked by Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum and Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins, said his administration is going to start cleaning the forests.

“And we spend billions and billions of dollars a year because people don’t clean the forests, and we’re going to clean the forests, we’re going to start cleaning them. We’re going to get rid of dead wood,” he said.

“The environmentalists say, ‘Oh no, let it regenerate.’ It doesn’t regenerate. It just sits there, and it usually catches fire, and we’re going to have a whole new system, and it’s called forest management,” the president added.

Burgum also spoke to forest management, particularly about ramping up the domestic lumber industry, which would help maintain forests and boost the local economies by reshoring timber jobs.

“Between the Interior and the Forest Service, which is part of the USDA, 700 million acres of surface area, much of that is in forest land — that is a tremendous resource. It’s part of America’s balance sheet,” Burgum said.

“When we let it burn, then we actually have to spend money coming through FEMA and other places,” he continued. “So we spend taxpayer dollars cleaning up a mess that could have been prevented.”

He went on to add:

Under President Trump’s leadership, we have to get back in the timber business and get back in the game, and when we do that, we have to make sure that we’re doing prevention, not just fighting fires after they all get out of control. And so again, working with OMB and others to make sure that we’ve got the budget for doing the prevention work and the forest management upfront reduces the expense of the cost on the back end of fighting these massive fires.

Trump’s hammering of California on the wildfire issue comes after fires torched Los Angeles County in January, and as riots have unfolded in Los Angeles over the federal government’s deportation operation, which Mayor Karen Bass (D) is calling an end to.