Published In

Frontiers in Sustainable Food Systems

Document Type

Article

Publication Date

8-18-2026

Subjects

Water Management -- Western North America, hydrosocial, irrigation, modernism, Western United States, water transfers

Abstract

The second administration of United States President Donald Trump has taken an authoritarian, centralized approach to governance in the United States. Water management is one area in which the president has attempted to show dominance. This research theorizes President Trump’s concept of water in the United States West as a “hydrosocial imaginary” in which the release of water from rivers and reservoirs indicates virility, action, and power, instead of liberal cautiousness and prudence. By ordering the release of two billion gallons of water from California’s Central Valley into the dry Tulare Basin one hundred miles north of Los Angeles for the purpose of battling the 2025 Los Angeles wildfires, Trump’s claim to have redirected water “down from the Pacific Northwest” into California to alleviate drought evokes an imaginary Western landscape of underexploited resources, instead of over-allocated river systems in water-stressed areas. Using content analysis of historical and contemporary newspaper articles and other relevant materials, this article first examines both parallel and contradictory rhetorical structures between Trump’s idea of water transfers and those of the past one hundred years. The article further refines this examination through semi-structured interviews of irrigators and water managers in the Pacific Northwest, demonstrating the differences between hydrosocial imaginaries of the Trump administration and those of actual water practitioners. The article concludes that Trump’s concept of what is possible in the development of hydraulic infrastructure represents a top-down technocratic authoritarian imaginary that echoes failed historical attempts at megaprojects. This approach is removed from present-day conditions in the United States West, and ignores the localist and regionally-grounded approaches of water practitioners. Overall, these findings suggest that the politics of water, agriculture, and natural resources do not settle comfortably along right- and left-wing polarities, but instead diverge between imaginaries that center localism and those that take a technocratic-authoritarian approach in relation to their views on potential for change to water systems, resource availability, power, and imagined connectivity.

Rights

Copyright (c) 2026 The Authors

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Locate the Document

10.3389/fsufs.2026.1869993

DOI

10.3389/fsufs.2026.1869993

Persistent Identifier

https://archives.pdx.edu/ds/psu/45084

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