Donald Trump has ridden through the fire and smoke of California with a rescue package for the state’s beleaguered wine growers.
As scores of people were evacuated from their homes and the State’s governor declared a state of emergency, the president set about dousing the flames with a smothering barrage of Tweets.
‘If fires are a problem year after year, why don’t you just grow grapes somewhere else? LOSERS,’ he tapped supportively.
‘I grow wine in Virginia at my Trump Winery,’ he continued. ‘It’s very good wine. Probably the best wine in the world. You should grow grapes there.
‘Not Napa. Not Sonoma. Virginia.’
Trump has regularly described California as a ‘FAILING state for wine’ and recently dismissed the Wine Spectator’s ‘Top 100 Wines’ results as ‘Fake News’.
So observers have been surprised by his rapid intervention this time, coming, as it does, barely six months after the first fires broke out.
‘Sometimes you just need ill-informed reaction from a climate-change denier to tell it how it is,’ said Robert Bonjovi of Potus I winery. ‘So I for one will be taking his advice and abandoning my heritage vines on the Rutherford Bench in favour of undrinkable hybrid rosés on the other side of the country as soon as I can.’
Speaking to Fake Booze, the Californian Growers Collective described Trump’s help as ‘impossible to put a value on. Literally.’
Read about how California’s growers have been battling the outbreak of zombies in their vineyards here