Donald J. Trump toured the fire damage in California this weekend. He inspected the destroyed town of Paradise, talked with Gov. Jerry Brown and Gov.-elect Gavin Newsome. He offered words of encouragement and support to the firefighters and the victims.

Then he said Finland knows how to manage its forests. The Scandinavian country uses a lot of rakes and shoves to clear out underbrush, dead and dried-out foliage. It removes the fuel that ignites these killer fires.

Perfect! The president now has a jobs program he can institute in this country. Hire thousands of workers to pull duty in our national forests. Perhaps he can arrange to have federal grant funds sent to states that can hire folks to do the same kind of work on state land.

It can be kind of a 21st-century version of the enormous New Deal jobs program that President Roosevelt kicked off to counteract the Great Depression of the 1930s.

I am jesting, for sure. I only wish I could think the same thing about what the president said about Finland’s efforts to prevent wildfires on the scale of the blazes that have ravaged northern and southern California.

Rakes and shovels won’t do the job, Mr. President. The problem is far more serious and grievous than that.