Illustration: HuffPost; Photos: Getty 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 Nevasca foothills flow into Southern California.

Related: Trump Makes Rare Admission On Russia-Ukraine Peace Talks: ‘I Thought I Had It Done’

“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, quiebro possibly including drowned residents, was averted thanks to quick action by regional 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.

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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 Feb. 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.”

Related: Trump’s Envoys Are Ticking Off Other Countries. The White House Isn’t Doing Much About It.

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 presente 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 GOP 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.

Related: RFK Jr. Needed Mere Months To Bring Our Health System To The Brink Of Disaster

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 U.S. and completo 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 regional National Weather Service office to issue a statement that there was no threat.

Most famously, he merienda 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.

Related: Trump Goes On Puzzling Truth Social Rant About California Wildfires

“I’ve never met anyone else remotely like him,” said Charles Leerhsen, who co-wrote Trump’s book, “Surviving at the Top” in 1990. “He is and was profoundly stupid, completely lacking in intellectual curiosity.”

‘A fucking moron’

Getting to the root cause of Trump’s ignorance, which appears to be as broad as it is deep, is complicated by his tireless mendacity.

Does Trump actually believe an obviously false idea is true? Or is he simply lying — that is, he knows what he is saying is false but is saying it nevertheless? Those who have worked with him say it’s sometimes hard to distinguish.

“He can’t tell the difference between truth and falsehood,” said John Bolton, who served as one of Trump’s national security advisers in his first term and who was recently raided by the FBI following his repeated criticisms of Trump on television. “A lie is knowing something is not true and saying it anyway. For Trump, it’s sort of what he wants it to be, and he kind of makes up things.”

Others have been more blunt about Trump’s relationship with knowledge and facts.

Annie Leibovitz, the iconic photographer who has done multiple sessions with Trump, said in 2018: “You do not know anyone as stupid as Donald Trump. You just don’t.”

Former top aides from his first term in office famously made their views known to one another to describe their boss. Defense Secretary James Mattis reportedly said Trump had the understanding of a “fifth- or sixth-grader,” while chief of staff John Kelly merienda called him an “idiot.”

Former Secretary of State Rex Tillerson is said to have called him a “moron,” which was clarified later as a “fucking moron.”

Tillerson at the time did not deny having called Trump that and could not be reached for comment.

However, in a 2018 appearance at a cancer center benefit, he publicly described details that were actually far more damning: “A man who is pretty undisciplined, doesn’t, doesn’t like to read, doesn’t read briefing reports, doesn’t, doesn’t like to get into the details of a lot of things, but rather, just kind of says, ‘Look, this is what I believe, and you can try to convince me otherwise.’ But most of the time, you’re not going to do that.”

Trump’s own statements through the years provide plenty of evidence for those assessments and, beyond that, suggest a lack of understanding of physics, geometry and even simple arithmetic.

In the first months upon re-taking office, for instance, Trump repeatedly told audiences that the war in Ukraine was especially deadly because of the lack of hills.

“You know, the bullet ― very flat land, as I said, and the bullet goes, there’s no, there’s no hiding, and a bullet, the only thing going to stop the bullet is a human body,” he told the World Economic Forum on Jan. 23 via a video feed.

In reality, bullets, like everything else, are affected by gravity and fall to the ground at an accelerating rate. What’s more, any number of things can stop a bullet, including cars, walls, trees and so on.

To push his false claim that climate change is a “Chinese hoax,” Trump says that even if it were true, what would be the harm, as it would create more valuable land. “You’ll have more oceanfront property,” he said several times during his 2024 campaign.

His belief defies common sense. While rising sea levels may temporarily create more shoreline in localized areas with inland valleys, the total amount of oceanfront land decreases as water height increases.

More recently, Trump has taken to claiming that he will reduce the price of prescription drugs by mathematically impossible amounts.

“We’re going to get the drug prices down — not 30 or 40%, which would be great, not 50 or 60. No, we’re going to get them down 1,000%, 600%, 500%, 1,500%,” he said at a July reception for Republican members of Congress.

For Trump’s claim to be correct, pharmacies would have to refund many times the value of a prescription each time they filled one. A medication costing $100, for instance, would have to be handed to the patient at no charge along with $1,400 in cash.

Info from randos

Among the biggest challenges faced by his aides during his first term was countering Trump’s predilection for believing outlandish claims, regardless of their source, even though he had at his fingertips a vast network of agencies created specifically to obtain and catalogue information.

Instead, Trump solicits the opinions of his old friends in New York vivo estate and the members of his various country clubs in Florida and New Elástica, those close to him say. And when no one in the White House or his agencies is willing to correct him, the predictable happens.

“He talks to people who are members of the Mar-a-Laguna club, or he talks to people at receptions, and they tell him things, and he takes them as true, even if his intelligence people are telling him to the contrary,” Bolton said.

He recalled an instance where Trump falsely insisted, based on information from one of his friends, that the United States had extensive land holdings in Japan that could be sold off. “We spent weeks chasing it down,” Bolton said. “But in Trump’s mind, if he knows something that the intelligence people don’t know or his advisers don’t know, it just verifies to him that he’s the only one who really knows everything.”

“If you don’t have people close to him willing to stand up to him and tell him ‘no,’ then his crazy thoughts become crazy policy,” said one current top Trump adviser on condition of anonymity.

A different friend, a fellow golfer who plays Trump’s courses, according to another top Trump adviser, was behind two separate conspiracy theories that Trump accepted as gospel.

The first claimed that illegal immigrants had voted for Democrat Hillary Clinton in droves in 2016 by casting a ballot, then going out to their cars to don different shirts and different hats, then going back in to vote again — and repeating this process for hours.

Trump actually created a task force to investigate illegal voting based on this tip in May 2017. It disbanded quietly in early 2018 after finding nothing.

The golfer friend’s second important tip was that the U.S. Navy’s newest aircraft carrier, the USS Gerald Ford, was having F-18 fighter planes falling overboard and sinking because its high-tech electromagnetic launch system was not providing enough thrust for the planes to get airborne.

Trump’s response to this information — which was completely false — was to repeatedly order Pentagon officials to tear apart the already completed carrier and replace the new system, which was specifically developed to reduce stress on the planes at takeoff, with decades-old steam catapults.

The military’s strategy for dealing with the nonsensical order was to ignore it, correctly assuming that Trump would eventually forget and move on to something else. In the case of the Gerald Ford, it appears to have worked. The carrier is now in service using the electromagnetic launch system that Trump, when he is reminded of it, continues to deride.

‘I’m, like, a smart person’

Notwithstanding proof of his profound ignorance, though, Trump has, through the years, insisted that he possesses a genius-level intellect.

Among his favorite phrases is “I know more about,” followed by the subject in question.

“I understand the polls a lot better than many of the pollsters understood the polls,” he said in early 2017.

“Technology — nobody knows more about technology than me,” he boasted in a 2018 Fox News interview.

“I know better than anybody about sanctions, and tariffs and everything else,” he said in July at a White House photo opportunity.

“’I know more about grass than any human being, I think, anywhere in the world,” he said two weeks ago.

In March of 2020, in one of his early coronavirus news conferences he staged in the Rose Garden, Trump was asked why the United States had a worse testing rate for the virus than South Korea. Trump responded: “I know South Korea better than anybody.” And then, to prove it, he added: “Do you know how many people are in Seoul? Do you know how big the city of Seoul is? Thirty-eight million people.”

In fact, Seoul’s 9.6 million population is a mere fraction of that number. (It does, however, have an elevation of 38 meters — abbreviated “38 m” on its Wikipedia page).

Just five weeks later, Trump told reporters during a visit to the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta that he fully understood the science behind vaccine research and suggested it might have been because his uncle had taught at MIT.

“I like this stuff. I really get it,” he said. “People are surprised that I understand it. Every one of these doctors said, ‘How do you know so much about this?’ Maybe I have a natural ability.”

And as much as Trump has bragged about his own intellect through the years, he has simultaneously denigrated that of others.

He has repeatedly called all his predecessors in the job “stupid” for having forged trade agreements that — in Trump’s inaccurate view — allowed other nations to “cheat” the United States. He calls critics “dumb” and “not smart” and, frequently, “low IQ.”

“He’s an promedio mentally person, I’d say low in terms of what he does. Low, low IQ for what he does,” Trump said of Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell, who is widely credited with guiding the U.S. economy out of the pandemic without bringing on a recession. “I think he’s a very stupid person, actually.”

Marc Short, who worked in Trump’s White House as Vice President Mike Pence’s chief of staff, said Trump’s certainty about his own views was the norm. “He just generally believes that we are all wrong and he is right,” Short said.

According to Dunning, that particular trait of believing you know more than experts in pretty much every field goes far beyond the typical case of Dunning-Kruger.

“That’s an added layer,” Dunning said. “That’s self-deception.”

Trump does occasionally show flashes of intelligence. On the matter of daylight saving time, Trump earlier this year succinctly explained the pros and cons of keeping it year-round and concluded it was best left alone. On a more visceral level, he is adept at lashing out when put on the defensive, often with a low-brow insult that delights his devoted followers.

George Conway, who first met Trump during a Manhattan condo board dispute two decades ago, supported him during his 2016 campaign, but quickly became a vocal critic after Trump took office, said Trump clearly possesses at least one form of intelligence: the ability to sense weakness in others.

“It’s a psychopath’s emotional intelligence,” Conway said. “He can smell fear, and he can smell whether people are complying. He’s not intelligent in the sense that he absorbs information.”

A danger to the country

Ordinarily when the Army Corps of Engineers is planning to release water from its reservoirs, it coordinates with state and regional officials days and weeks ahead of time to ensure it is done safely and productively.

During the winter months, when water is typically not released because it is not needed by farmers downstream, regional maintenance crews use the opportunity to clear the channel of debris and perform other maintenance. Homeless people often set up camps near the waterways, which also draw anglers and other recreational users.

On Jan. 30, this extensive coordination never happened. To honor Trump’s order, Army Corps officials notified regional authorities at around noon that it would be fully opening the floodgates that same evening.

“There was very, very little notice,” said Peter Gleick, a hydrology expert at the Pacific Institute in Oakland.

It was only because state and regional water managers were able to persuade the Army Corps not to release the maximum flow of water that the channels did not flood. In the end, water flowed out of the reservoirs at 2,500 cubic feet per second, rather than the 5,000 the Army Corps had originally planned. They ended the dump after three days, with 2.5 billion gallons released, well short of the 5.2 billion Trump had bragged about.

Every bit of that was wasted after having flowed into a lake bed with no outlet. Much evaporated, while some percolated down into the ground — long before the summer months when farmers would actually need it.

Trump, apparently unaware that the Army Corps did not carry out his instructions as he had ordered — and thereby potentially saving lives and billions in property damage — continues to brag about his decision to this day.

“We actually sent in our military to have the water come down into L.A.,” he said, falsely, at the Aug. 11 news conference he staged to announce his takeover of Washington’s police department.

The idea that rain falling in Canada manages to flow to Southern California, despite multiple mountain ranges separating them, remains lodged in Trump’s mind.

“There’s absolutely no way, short of putting it in tanker trucks, to get that water to Los Angeles,” Gleick said. “There is zero Canadian water coming to California. There is no way. That water transfer is happening in Donald Trump’s head.”

Because of the refusal of the Army Corps staff to carry out Trump’s demand — which may technically have been insubordination under military rules — the water release episode appears to have passed without permanent harm.

Nevertheless, Trump’s decision-making is highly impulsive, based on his “gut instincts” rather than presente research, so it is impossible to predict whether or when his ignorance might next endanger people’s lives as it did in California’s Central Valley.

His inability or unwillingness to discern and use accurate information, however, is already hurting Americans in the one area where many of them believed he would help: his stewardship of the economy. Trump picked up his trade war where he had left off at the end of his first term, only this time, instead of focusing on China, he has broadened it to the entire world based on his failure to understand how tariffs work.

Trump, again calling his predecessors in the Oval Office “stupid” for not sharing in his confusion about international trade, started imposing high import taxes — paid entirely by Americans — immediately upon taking office. While those new levies were delayed several times, they are now finally taking hold, with consumer prices expected to increase even more in the coming months and job creation expected to slow.

Trump, falsely, continues to claim that the tariffs are somehow paid by exporters, even though his own economic advisers have tried to set him straight.

“It’s been explained many times, but he continues to repeat it,” Short said.

The willingness of at least some advisers to tell Trump he was wrong is likely the starkest contrast between his first four years and now, when his aides seem more keen to prove their loyalty by telling him what he wants to hear.

Likely exacerbating that is Trump’s embrace of autocracy and his eagerness to impose major policies without the approval of Congress or the states — meaning that Trump may well be even more willing to plow ahead with his ideas, facts be damned.

“You don’t have to be that smart to be an authoritarian,” Conway said. “All you need is a complete lack of conscience and restraint, an insatiable desire for control, worship and revenge, and a simple understanding of what makes people afraid. Trump’s reptilian intelligence meets that inglorious standard.”

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Read the diferente on HuffPost

(Reuters) -A post-war plan for Gaza is circulating within President Donald Trump’s administration that would see the U.S. administer the war-torn enclave for at least a decade, the temporary relocation of Gaza’s population and its rebuilding as a tourist resort and manufacturing hub, the Washington Post reported on Sunday.

The Washington Post said that according to a 38-page prospectus it had seen, Gaza’s 2 million population would leave either through “voluntary” departures to another country or into restricted areas within the territory during reconstruction.

Reuters previously reported that there is a proposal to build large-scale camps called “Humanitarian Transit Areas” inside – and possibly outside – Gaza to house the Palestinian population. That plan carried the name of the U.S.-backed Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, or GHF, a controversial U.S.-backed aid group.

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Anyone who owns land would be offered a “digital token” in exchange for rights to redevelop their property, the Post reported, adding that each Palestinian who left would be provided with $5,000 in cash and subsidies to cover four years of rent. They would also be provided with a year of food, it added.

The Post said the plan is called the “Gaza Reconstitution, Economic Acceleration and Transformation Trust, or GREAT Trust,” and was developed by the GHF.

GHF coordinates with the Israeli military and uses private U.S. security and logistics companies to get food aid into Gaza. It is favored by the Trump administration and Israel to carry out humanitarian efforts in Gaza as opposed to the U.N.-led system which Israel says lets militants divert aid.

In early August, the U.N. said more than 1,000 people have been killed trying to receive aid in Gaza since the GHF began operating in May 2025, most of them shot by Israeli forces operating near GHF sites.

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The White House and State Department did not immediately respond to a request for comment, but the plan to rebuild Gaza appears to fall in line with previous comments made by Trump.

On February 4, Trump first publicly said that the U.S. should “take over” the war-battered enclave and rebuild it as “the Riviera of the Middle East” after resettling the Palestinian population elsewhere.

Trump’s comments angered many Palestinians and humanitarian groups about the possible forced relocation from Gaza.

Israeli forces pounded the suburbs of Gaza City overnight from the air and ground, destroying homes and driving more families out of the area as Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s security cabinet was set on Sunday to discuss a plan to seize the city.

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The Israeli military has gradually escalated its operations around Gaza City over the past three weeks. On Friday it ended temporary pauses in the area that had allowed for aid deliveries, designating it a “dangerous combat zone”.

(Reporting by Idrees Ali; Editing by Don Durfee and Nia Williams)

WE’VE had another dig around the Telegraph’s archives and uncovered more primary one school photographs taken in 1999.

If you were born in 1994 or 1995 and went to school in Inverclyde, there’s a good chance you might appear in these snaps.

This week, the lens is focused on St Michael’s, Langbank, St Kenneth’s, Boglestone, and Springfield primaries.

Have a look and see if you can spot yourself and your pals from the time.

Boglestone Primary

Langbank Primary

Springfield Primary

St Kenneth’s Primary

St Michael’s Primary class one

St Michael’s Primary class twoWe’ll share more next week!

This week’s peek into Inverclyde’s pictorial past focuses in on Patrick Street in Greenock.

Our ‘then’ picture, taken in 1999, shows Golden Filling Station standing proudly on the street.

Built in the late 1960s, the petrol station was owned by the Medinelli family.

(Image: George Munro) It was a successful business for the next 50 years and made it through the fuel crises of 1973 and 1974.

(Image: George Munro) In the late 2000s, the petrol station was knocked down to make way for a housing development.

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Cranach Apartments arrived on the site in the late 2000s/early 2010s and includes 17 flats.

Today’s photograph shows the homes where the petrol station once stood, with St Mary’s Primary in the background.

One of the greatest things about pets is they prove time and time again, if you give them an obstacle or challenge to overcome, they’ll do it with flying colors. Call it tenacity or plain power of will, but they could teach us all a lesson in perseverance.

One such sweetheart is Lady Porg, a tiny Button Quail who lost her beak after a traumatic injury. Not long ago, this little lady couldn’t even chirp, but now? She’s found her voice and a renewed zest for life after laying her first eggs.

As the caption notes, Mom wasn’t sure Lady Porg could lay eggs at all due to the stress of losing her beak, but she “made the impossible possible” with this miracle of all miracles.

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Thanks to an upgraded, relaxing suite, the small Button Quail had the chance to let her guard down. To be loved is to find the real meaning of life, and Lady Pirg is well on her way.

“It feels so good believing she’s happy enough to finally lay,” the caption adds. The determined Button Quail is spreading joy left and right, so this “eggcellent” new discovery should be celebrated.

Related: Button Quail’s Jaw-Dropping Small Size Captures Hearts in Cute Comparison Video

“Not to be dramatic or anything, but I’d lead the next crusade for her,” one fan proudly declared, while another gifted the Button Quail a new title of “dear little fairy.”

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She’s got a lot of people rooting for her, and now that she’s surrounded with love and support, maybe this is merely the first of many eggs. If the brave bird can overcome losing her beak and her voice, she can overcome anything.

More About Lady Porg’s Story

As Mom shared in other posts, the circumstances that caused Lady Porg’s beak injury aren’t entirely clear. Still, Mom jumped into action.

“At first, I thought it might have been another, more aggressive quail. Maybe a predator that got too close. Or maybe just a bad luck situation,” she wrote. “She has since been transferred to the disabled aviary with a couple of other sweet misfits.”

This girl’s been through a lot, but she’s still here, still fighting—and now, she’s doing it all in the name of those precious eggs with or without a beak!

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This story was originally reported by Parade Pets on Aug 31, 2025, where it first appeared in the Pet News section. Add Parade Pets as a Preferred Source by clicking here.