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 got to clean your floors, you 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, Trump treated an angry screed

at California Governor Gavin Newsom.

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