While surveying wildfire damage in California over the weekend, President Donald Trump called it “unbelievable” while repeating his longstanding claim that poor forest management plays a role.

During his first presidential term in 2018, Trump drew criticism after saying during a California wildfire visit that Finland “rakes” its forests to prevent wildfires. “I was with the president of Finland,” Trump said. “And he said ‘We have a much different … we’re a forest nation.’ And they spent a lot of time on raking and cleaning and doing things, and they don’t have any problem.”

In response, Finland’s then-President Sauli Niinisto said the topic of “raking” had never come up between them. Niinisto did allow that Finland has a good fire monitoring system and that he’d told Trump, “We take care of our forests.”

It wasn’t long before Finns were posting photos, rakes in hand, joking about “raking America great again.” There are T-shirts and coffee mugs as well. Whether they’re meant to be celebratory or derisive may depend on the buyer.

In the end, the use of the term “raking” probably speaks more to a careless use of language than the real issue at hand. During another wildfire visit to California in 2020, President Trump emphasized “taking care” of the forest, claiming countries in Europe are “very, very strong on management and they don’t have a problem.”

In an interview Wednesday with Fox News’ Sean Hannity, Trump offered this: “Remember when I took criticism because they said, you have to manage your forest. The head of a country that lives in forest, a number of them actually. Finland told me this, Austria told me this, the head of Austria, head of Finland, and it was beautiful the way they expressed it. They said, we live in a forest. We are a forest nation. That’s beautiful, isn’t it, to say that. We have trees that are the most magnificent in the world, far more beautiful than what they have in California and much more flammable. He said, we don’t have forest fires. We manage our forest.”

Trump’s admonitions haven’t gone ignored. In the years since his 2020 wildfire visit, California has moved toward more aggressive vegetation control, though Republicans lawmakers insist the pace is too slow. This dispute over forest management is unlikely to end soon, regardless how much land is “raked” — whether that means removing underbrush and debris, harvesting timber, conducting prescribed burns or allowing goats and sheep to graze the landscape.

State officials report 1,500 square miles of state and federal land came under treatment in 2023 alone. Also, it should be noted, the federal government owns 57% of California’s forest land versus 3% owned by the state.

In southern California, the mountains around Los Angeles feature chaparral scrub, described by the U.S. Forest Service as “highly flammable.” As residential developments increasingly merge with wildland, weather may be what matters most as far as fire risk.

Before the recent outbreak of California fires, storms in previous seasons had brought vegetation back to life. Then, as drought again took hold, the Los Angeles region was ripe for disaster.

The recipe was two rainy winters followed by eight months of negligible rainfall. The final ingredient was winds of up to 100 mph. Step back a moment, and imagine what the wildfire threat in the Upper Peninsula would be under those circumstances.

“With any ignition and the fuels being so dry, those wind-driven fires are almost unstoppable when the winds are that high,” Lenya Quinn-Davidson, director of University of California Agriculture and Natural Resources Fire Network, told CNN on Friday. “For the fires we’re seeing — I think you’d have a hard time arguing those could be prevented with fuels treatments.”

Chris Field, a Stanford University professor and climate scientist, told PBS News that in addition to forest measures, homeowners and fire professionals can assist with fuel management by clearing flammable materials and vegetation around homes to create a buffer zone. But he, too, could seen no evidence “that fuel management (or the lack of fuel management) played a role in the L.A. fires.”

Professor Stefan Doerr, a wildfires expert at Swansea University in Wales, told BBC that drier, hotter and windy conditions are, indeed, the key factor. Even in California areas where there have been attempts to reduce flammable material, it’s not clear how much difference it would make, he said. “The bottom line remains that the extreme meteorological conditions are the main drivers for these extreme fires,” he said.

Presidential assertions aside, it’s a dire threat not so easy to rake away.