… It all may have started in 2007 with a failed golf course deal. That year, Trump toured a failing golf course called Running Horse in Fresno. “What Trump saw was more than 400 acres of mostly weeds, several huge trenches for sunken fairways and only two holes with grass,” the Fresno Bee reported. … Trump made an offer, then pulled out — and by 2014, an almond orchard had taken over the site. Then, in early 2016, Johnny Amaral, a politically connected water authority executive, organized a roundtable for Trump with 50 farmers to discuss water issues and a tour of the Central Valley. Amaral did not return calls from The Fact Checker, but he has described the session in interviews over the years. Amaral told the Los Angeles Times that the message to Trump was that “the Central Valley is not out of water because of the drought, but because the water is mismanaged.”