Okay, in August of 2020, Donald Trump was campaigning for re-election amid a series of ongoing crises.

We were in the throes of the COVID-19 pandemic.

The summer saw a wave of protests and uprisings over the murder of George Floyd.

And to top it all off, the state of California was experiencing its largest wildfire season in recorded history.

And it was that last crisis that prompted Donald Trump to say this during a campaign rally

in Pennsylvania.

And I see again the forest fires are starting.

It's starting again in California.

I said, you've got to clean your floors.

You've got to clean your forests.

They have many, many years of leaves and broken trees and they're like, like so

flammable. You touch them and it goes up. I've been telling them this now for three years, but they don't want to listen.

The environment, the environment, but they have massive fires again in California.

Maybe we're just going to have to make them pay for it.

Maybe we're just going to have to make them pay for it.

Trump bizarrely and falsely claimed that wildfires were somehow the result of California officials not cleaning the

floors of the forest and then threatened to make California pay for its own

disaster relief. For the record, Trump's claim has been thoroughly debunked. The state of California owns only 3% of its forests.

The rest are owned by private groups or the federal government, and federal agencies do take regular steps to mitigate the buildup of

debris in the forest. I don't know if that includes cleaning the floors, whatever that

means. But that reality didn't keep Trump from repeating this claim over and over again.

The previous year, when California wildfires were also raging,

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