Washington, D.C. — U.S. Senator Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) joined MSNBC’s The Last Word with Lawrence O’Donnell to discuss President Donald Trump’s careless decision to direct California officials to needlessly release billions of gallons of water and create more problems for California’s farmers, Trump and Elon Musk’s campaign of vandalism, and standing up to the Trump administration’s attacks on Californians, including immigrant families.
Watch the full interview here.
Key Excerpts:
On Trump’s reckless decision to needlessly release water for a political talking point:
[…] I spent part of this weekend in the Central Valley, which is the largest agricultural producing area in the country. No one can make heads or tails out of what Donald Trump did or why, or thinks it makes any sense whatsoever. As you were pointing out, that water can’t get to Los Angeles. The fires are out, they’re not 5% contained, or 20%, or 50% contained. They’re 100% contained. So, that water is going to be of no use to firefighters. But here’s the thing, it’s been a dry winter. There isn’t as much snowpack as we would usually have. We rely on water that is stored like this water when farmers need it in summer to irrigate. They’re not irrigating now. So, that water is going to sit in a lake, it’s going to evaporate, it’s going to be wasted. And had local authorities not prevailed at the last minute, instead of wasting one to three billion gallons of water, it would have been two or three times that amount. That’s what the president wanted to release.
That not only would have wasted so much more water, but it would have endangered people along the river banks. It also might have flooded crops. And I can only think that someone got to the administration and said, “Do you really want images of people washed away by this water or crops destroyed by this water to help you with your photo op?” It was just a boneheaded thing to do and wasteful of a precious resource.
On Elon Musk and Trump’s unchecked power grab:
[…] I look at what’s being done in my old department, the Justice Department, by this retribution campaign, this purge, firing top prosecutors, firing top FBI agents, this is going to make us less safe. We have some of the most experienced people fighting crime who are being fired because they’re on Donald Trump’s enemies list. This effort to violate the law, shutter USAID. Elon Musk, the oligarch running, really a rampage, a campaign of vandalism against some of these agencies like USAID, or seeking to get data to, I guess, supplement the data he already owns. To me, it all fits under the rubric of corruption. This is a corrupt regime trying to aggrandize itself, trying to gain more power, trying to make itself richer. And so I think we not only have to identify the most significant things to push back on and use every tool we can. We also have to explain how does this all fit together? It all fits together as part of a corrupt scheme to turn this country into one man rule and to enrich Donald Trump and his wealthy friends like Elon Musk.
On tuning out Washington’s chaos to serve Californians:
I try to focus on the big things that matter the most. And to me, some of the things that matter the most are, for example, the mass deportations. I spoke to farmworkers who lost their husbands. Their husbands were deported, pulled over at random. I talked to children whose fathers were taken out of the country, who were in tears. I talked to mothers who were afraid to take their kids to school. That really matters.
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