The Nuclear Option — Trigger Warning: Trump Correct About Forest Mismanagement

These people are looking for Nero. Just so long as he keeps playing the fiddle so nicely.

Literally, the world of Never-Trumpers and late-stage victims of Trump Derangement Syndrome cannot find the slightest whiff of good in anything this president does.

Whether it is calling out election fraud, combatting “fake news” or trying to halt a caravan bound for the border, in their eyes, President Trump can do no good.

Entering Year Three of Mr. Trump’s presidency, these people have somehow managed to find fresh reserves of outrage to stoke their fires of hatred for Donald Trump. Nothing to date has infuriated them so much as Mr. Trumpweighing in the historic wildfires plaguing California.

It has become routine coverage of the president to accuse him of lying about the fires, making up science and politicizing the scorching tragedies. As usual, Mr. Trump’s choice for landing himself in hot water is Twitter.

“There is no reason for these massive, deadly and costly forest fires in California except that forest management is so poor,” the Presidential Thumbs proclaimed. “Billions of dollars are given each year, with so many lives lost, all because of gross mismanagement of the forests.”

And, if that wasn’t incendiary enough, Mr. Trump added a startling rebuke of the California overseers of said forest management: “Remedy now, or no more Fed payments!”

Now, in this age when everybody is a victim, it is not routine for a politician to threaten an entire state of victims while wildfires are still churning through their state. In most cases, politicians usually prefer to just pick up the fiddle and fiddle away. While California burns.

Mr. Trump, on the other hand, has never been much of a fiddler. It is usually his style to look at such carnage and go charging off in search of who is to blame and how the problem might be fixed.

With good reason, it turns out.

Despite all the caterwauling from so-called “environmentalists” trying to pin the blame for the wildfires on global warming, it turns out that there are far more urgent and relevant culprits.

Namely, forest management. Just like President Trump said.

Crystal Kolden, a professor of fire science at University of Idaho writing in the virulently anti-Trump New York Times, confirmed Mr. Trump’s fury over forest mismanagement.

Not only has this incompetence “created an abundance of fuel scattered across many of our forests,” Ms. Kolden wrote, it makes “the fires that do rage out of control — like the Camp Fire in Northern California and the Woolsey Fire near Los Angeles — much deadlier.”

Such poor management includes the failure to perform prescribed burns in more populated areas such as in California. That poor management extends to the massive tracts of national forests in places like Colorado where so-called “environmentalists” use court challenges to prevent any logging, which curtails the natural spread of killer beetles and removes freshly killed standing trees.

Without select cutting or timbering, what remains is a tinderbox that will — eventually — go up in a plume of smoke that the so-called “environmentalists” will then claim as evidence somehow of their kooky religion.

“With hotter and drier weather on the way, forest fires will be a part of life for tens of millions of Americans for the foreseeable future,” Ms. Kolden wrote. “We need a new way to deal with them — not just better management, as the president suggests, but an entirely different approach to where and how we live in fire-prone areas.”

If it were left up to the Never-Trumpers and Trump Derangement Syndrome patients, he would just play the fiddle instead.

• Charles Hurt can be reached at churt@washingtontimes.com; follow him on Twitter via @charleshurt.