Read: It’s (mostly) not FEMA’s fault

Ernest Abbott, an attorney at Baker Donelson and FEMA’s general counsel from 1997 to 2001, told me that the White House could decline to authorize new funds for California without running into major legal obstacles. But it would struggle to withhold the $49 million that FEMA had already approved, he said.

“Under the Stafford Act, the president and FEMA have the discretionary authority to provide assistance to state and local governments,” he told me. The key word there is discretionary, meaning that when a disaster strikes, the president is not legally required to spend any money under the law.

That initial decision, to grant funds or not, cannot be challenged in court except on constitutional grounds (such as accusations of racial bias), Abbott said. But once FEMA has approved funds, courts can oversee any decision to withdraw them.

But Abbott admitted that it was difficult to know what, if any, legal action the president actually intended in his tweet. “I really don’t know how this one-sentence directive will be implemented,” he said.

In that way, Trump’s threat—or is it an order?—captures his presidency in microcosm. If Karl Marx wrote that history repeats itself, “first as tragedy, then as farce,” then Trump offers the experience of watching farce and tragedy happen simultaneously.

Farce: The president’s tweet isn’t just factually wrong. It points to an understanding of California’s fire problem that conflicts directly with what experts and firefighters describe. It is not clear that better forest management—especially raking and clearing, the techniques that Trump favors—would entirely prevent California’s ravenous wildfires. In any case, the U.S. Forest Service has currently stopped all forest-management work due to the government shutdown.

There are policies that could improve California’s resilience to wildfires. PG&E, the local electric utility, could update its infrastructure, reducing the chance of a power line sparking an errant blaze. For the past century, fire departments have fought virtually every forest fire; western forests are now packed with brush, debris, and dense stands of trees. The state or federal government could try to clear that fuel by attempting controlled burns—although experts say those burns would have to be of a much larger scale than virtually any equivalent burn now attempted in the United States.

The United States could also try to slow climate change, which has turned hot days into heat waves and verdant forests into dry tinderboxes. Between 1984 and 2015, the effects of climate change may have doubled the acreage burned by western wildfires, according to a recent study cited in the National Climate Assessment. But Trump, of course, has rejected both that assessment and most of the conclusions of climate science. He has fixated instead on raking forest floors.