What did Donald Trump do today?

He bragged about wasting billions of gallons of water hundreds of miles from any fire in California.

Trump attended the National Prayer breakfast today. Wandering away from his prepared remarks, he said this about the recent fires in the Los Angeles era: 

The water comes down from the northwest parts of Canada, I guess, but the Pacific Northwest. And it comes down by millions and millions of barrels a day and uh, I opened it up. It wasn't that easy to do. But I opened it up and it's pouring down and it's, it's a beautiful thing, and uh it shoulda happened, I told them to do— it in my last term, they didn't do it, but now we just did it, they didn't want to do it but we did it.

Earlier this month, Trump rattled off a series of inflammatory lies about how California officials were refusing to release water from elsewhere in the state to fight them. After taking office, Trump continued to insist that "pumps and valves" existed that could have brought water from northern California straight into the mountains around Los Angeles for firefighting. 

To prove the point, Trump ordered the Army Corps of Engineers to open the spillways on reservoirs in the Sierra Nevadas. This released enormous amounts water into local rivers—meaning that it was unavailable for use by farmers, and more importantly, won't be there during the dry season when it's most needed. (Local farmers, who were an island of strong support for Trump in heavily Democratic California, were dismayed and frustrated.)

The water lost was also unavailable for firefighting. There are several mountain ranges between the Central Valley, where the water was lost, and Los Angeles. It did, however, threaten to cause floods and erode levees.

All told, 2.2 billion gallons were pumped out and, for the most part, lost into the water table. Southern California is in the midst of a severe drought.

Water from the "northwest parts of Canada"—or the northwest parts of the United States, for that matter—has even less to do with southern California, and in spite of Trump's claims today, his emptying of reservoirs didn't involve water from those places at all. As quite a few people noted online today, Trump's Canada water theory only makes sense if he assumes that water naturally flows "downhill" from north to south.

Why does this matter?

• We shouldn't have to wonder whether the president understands geography as well as a third-grader.

• Wasting billions of gallons during a drought to score political points is stupid.

• Making up meandering, factually inaccurate stories is called "confabulation" and it is not a sign of good mental health.