Water is the third rail of Idaho politics. Touch it and you die.

Yet former President Donald Trump has tightly grabbed it with both hands.

At a Friday the 13th news conference at his golf course outside Los Angeles, Trump endorsed the idea of shifting water from the Pacific Northwest to the thirsty cities and burning forests of the Golden State:

“So you have millions of gallons of water pouring down from the north, with the snowcaps and Canada and — all pouring down. And they have a — essentially, a very large faucet. And you turn the faucet, and it takes one day to turn it. It’s massive. It’s as big as the wall of that building, right there, behind you. And you turn that, and all of that water goes into the — aimlessly into the Pacific. And if they turned it back, all of that water would come right down here and right into Los Angeles.”

Quipped veteran Idaho environmental journalist Rocky Barker in Thursday’s Lewiston Tribune: “We call that faucet the Columbia River.”

Maybe that’s just another of Trump’s ill-informed and irresponsible campaign sales pitches.

The Canadians aren’t sold on it.

“It’s unrealistic for ecological as well as commercial reasons,” Werner Antweiler of the University of British Columbia Sauder School of Business told a Canadian news outlet. “And it would actually require a treaty and we would not negotiate a treaty that would be to the detriment of Canada.”

The renegotiated Columbia River Treaty also requires a two-thirds ratification vote in the Senate. Who knows how a Trump administration might address that process?

Realizing Trump’s vision would require enormous concessions from Congress, particularly with respect to environmental and species conservation laws.

For the sake of argument, however, suppose Trump is serious and he prevails with a Republican Congress that has shown him great deference in the past.

That would have severe consequences on water quality in the Pacific Northwest.

The region’s imperiled salmon and steelhead runs would be sacrificed.

Less water in the Columbia means less hydroelectric generation for the region.

That kind of nightmarish scenario for northern Idaho and eastern Washington would not necessarily extend to the Snake River, which drains into 85% of southern Idaho — at least not immediately.

There is, however, the precedent of a powerful, populated state working with the federal government to abrogate the Gem State’s sovereignty over its water. Mindful of how Los Angeles stripped the Owens Valley of its water in the early part of the 20th century — and the mounting pressure to pipe Idaho’s water toward the growing metropolis in the 1960s — Idaho lawmakers sprang into action. They declared control over every drop of Idaho water and then established the Idaho Water Resource Board to “formulate and adopt a comprehensive state water plan for conservation, development, management, and optimum use of all unappropriated water resources and waterways of the state in the public interest.”

Even as late as the 1990s, as Dean Miller reported in the Christian Science Monitor, a Los Angeles county supervisor raised the idea of piping the Snake River at Hagerman, pumping it uphill to Jackpot, Nev., and then allowing the water to be gravity fed into Lake Mead.

Woe to the Idaho leader who didn’t defend the state’s water.

As popular as he was, former Gov. Cecil Andrus’s 1986 campaign found itself fending off accusations that he accepted campaign contributions from California irrigators. Andrus denied the charges and went on to win a narrow victory over then Lt. Gov. David Leroy.

Former Idaho Supreme Court Justice Cathy Silak was not as fortunate.

In 1999, she authored a 3-2 decision that suggested the federal government reserved control over water flowing through the Frank Church-River of No Return, Selway-Bitteroot and Gospel Hump wilderness areas as well as the Hells Canyon National Recreation Area.

“Silak should be well aware there isn’t a single Idaho politician in the last 30-plus years — Democrat or Republican — who would dare run on the platform to allow the federal government to control every drop of water in designated areas of the state,” observed the Idaho Statesman. “Anyone who did would not be elected or stay in office for long.”

In 2000, Silak became the first Idaho Supreme Court justice to lose reelection in 56 years.

So why the silence now?

This could threaten every farmer operating in Congressman Mike Simpson’s district.

Sen. Mike Crapo, R-Idaho, is a Harvard-trained water attorney.

You’ll find no more stalwart defenders of Idaho’s water than Gov. Brad Little and Lt. Gov. Scott Bedke.

No one is more enthused about defending the state against the federal government than Attorney General Raul Labrador.

If the Biden administration even hinted at this kind of rhetoric, they’d all be at Defcon 1.

Trump has stated his priorities clearly: “So California, vote for Trump, and you’re going to have water, and you’re going to have growth, and you’re going to have prosperity.”

In other words, Idaho: Vote for Trump and you won’t have water, growth or prosperity. — M.T.