As Worst Fire in LA History Raged, Trump Saw Tragedy as a Political Opportunity
Trump has treated the crisis like a political football. Will he also use FEMA funds as leverage over California?
By Sasha Abramsky ,
January 9, 2025
Firefighters battle the Eaton Fire in strong winds as many homes burn on January 7, 2025, in Pasadena, California.David McNew / Getty Images
Los Angeles, the U.S.’s second largest city, is currently being consumed by the worst fires in its history. And instead of expressing solidarity and empathy, our incoming president is playing crude, juvenile political games.
On Wednesday morning, as tens of thousands of residents were being evacuated in the face of devastating fires along the coastal stretch from Santa Monica through Malibu as well as inland in the Altadena region, Donald Trump took to social media to post nonsensical attacks on “Governor Newscum” and water policies that allegedly favored endangered fish species over humans. Syntax be damned, Trump wrote that “he is the blame for this.”
Meanwhile, firefighters fought desperately to contain blazes that were being spread by hurricane force Santa Ana winds, and flames crept close to cultural landmarks such as the Getty Villa Museum.
Later on in the day, Trump inexplicably sought to pin blame on President Biden for hydrants in the fire zone running out of water, writing: “NO WATER IN THE FIRE HYDRANTS, NO MONEY IN FEMA. THIS IS WHAT JOE BIDEN IS LEAVING ME. THANKS JOE!”
To be absolutely clear, these fires have nothing to do with policies toward fish; nor does the U.S. president personally keep a daily tab on the functionality of fire hydrants in every city in the country.
If there is an easy to understand cause for these fires, it’s the fact that fierce Santa Ana winds roared through a region parched by the lack of rain this winter. In part, it was simply bad luck in a region that historically runs dry; but it is also a likely symptom of a rapidly warming planet — a product of the human-made climate crisis that Trump has repeatedly dismissed as a hoax.
Trump’s inane gambit to blame the fires on conservation efforts and Democratic politicians was, unfortunately, quite in keeping with myriad other examples of his boorish behavior. The day before, on Tuesday, the incoming U.S. leader held a press conference in which he threatened military action against Panama and Denmark, and pledged extreme economic coercion against Canada unless Canada agreed to dissolve itself and be subsumed into the United States.
None of this is normal. Twenty-first century U.S. presidents shouldn’t be bandying about such overtly expansionist military threats like mid-century European fascists. They certainly aren’t supposed to demand that a close ally simply cease to exist. Nor are they supposed to stoke political discord when a major U.S. city is facing an unprecedented disaster.
Imagine the GOP reaction if President Biden had taken to X to ridicule political figures in Florida and North Carolina in the wake of recent natural disasters. Imagine the calls for political retribution that would have followed if any other president had taken advantage of a tornado or an earthquake, a flood, a fire or a hurricane, to try to score cheap political points.
We are, alas, in an entirely new world, one that rewards Trump for his outrages rather than punishing him. In such a world, it’s tempting to simply tune out. There is, after all, only so much toxicity that the human brain can tolerate. But this is, in fact, deadly serious and thus entirely worth paying attention to.
When Hurricane Maria devastated Puerto Rico in 2017, Trump went to political war with the island’s leaders and then turned the entire thing into an entertainment spectacle. He restricted the amount of aid to be sent Puerto Rico’s way, and visited the wrecked island only to spend his time throwing rolls of paper towels out to desperate residents and, like some sadistic circus master, watching them scramble for these bare necessities.
After wildfires devastated California in 2018, Trump went off on a tirade blaming the state for not raking its forests better, and then in 2019 threatened to cut off its federal emergency assistance. “Unless they get their act together, which is unlikely, I have ordered FEMA to send no more money. It is a disgraceful situation in lives & money!” Even worse, during Trump’s first term, aides reported that he tried to prevent federal emergency response dollars being sent to California because it was a Democratic state and he disliked its political priorities.
In 2020, in the dying days of his first term, Trump did, briefly, succeed in blocking the distribution of disaster relief funds to California. Soon afterward, however, facing political blowback, he reversed his position and allowed the aid to be sent California’s way.
Over the last few months, Trump’s team has doubled down on the notion that they will withhold all federal funds from cities and states that embrace “sanctuary” policies designed to thwart his efforts at mass deportation of immigrants. Since Los Angeles and California have such policies in place, it’s likely that, come January 20, Trump could put up roadblocks making it difficult for FEMA and other funds to flow west to provide relief in response to this vast disaster.
If Trump’s presidency promises chaos, that chaos is likely to be felt acutely in blue states that have experienced disasters and need assistance from the federal government to rebuild. There’s now a real prospect that Los Angeles’s fire victims will not only have to come to terms with the loss of their homes and businesses, but will also have to grapple with the reality of a president who has repeatedly threatened California’s disaster response funds and who believes he has the right to punish individual states whose leadership doesn’t show enough fealty to the one and only Donald J. Trump.
Regardless of one’s political affiliations, such a scenario ought to send chills down the spine of anyone who cares about this country’s future.
This article is licensed under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0), and you are free to share and republish under the terms of the license.
Sasha Abramsky is a freelance journalist and a part-time lecturer at the University of California at Davis. His work has appeared in numerous publications, including The Nation, The Atlantic Monthly, New York Magazine, The Village Voice and Rolling Stone. He also writes a weekly political column. Originally from England, with a bachelor’s in politics, philosophy and economics from Oxford University and a master’s degree from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, he now lives in Sacramento, California.
Critics Say Trump Got 'Nothing Right' About Causes of LA Wildfires
One observer blasted MAGA's "conflagration of lies and disinformation."
Then-U.S. President Donald Trump speaks during a briefing on wildfires with local and federal fire and emergency officials in Sacramento, California on September 14, 2020.
(Photo: Brendan Smialowski/AFP via Getty Images)
Brett Wilkins
Jan 09, 2025
COMMON DREAMS
Progressive critics were left shaking their heads this week as Republican U.S. President-elect Donald Trump and his MAGA allies absurdly blamed the Los Angeles County wildfires on everything from an ichthyophile governor to diversity policies—while ignoring what experts say is the true cause of the deadly infernos.
On Wednesday, Trump took to his Truth social media platform to falsely accuse Democratic California Gov. Gavin Newsom—whom he repeatedly called "Newscum"—of refusing "to sign the water restoration declaration put before him that would have allowed millions of gallons of water... to flow daily into many parts of California, including the areas that are currently burning in a virtually apocalyptic way."
Newsom's office responded to Trump's accusation by correctly noting that "there is no such document as the water restoration declaration."
Trump also accused Newsom of wanting "to protect an essentially worthless fish called a smelt, by giving it less water," a red herring and false statement given that the state's plan to protect the endangered delta smelt actually involved increasing the amount of fresh water flowing into its habitat.
Jeffrey Mount, a water policy expert at the nonpartisan Public Policy Institute of California, toldMSNBC newsletter editor Ryan Teague Beckwith on Thursday that Trump got "nothing right" in his post.
Summarizing his interview with Mount, Teague Beckwith wrote:
Without getting into too much detail, here's what did happen... During Trump's first term, his administration sought to divert some of the water coming into a river delta near San Francisco to farmers in the San Joaquin Valley, among others. They came up with a plan for the water, which Newsom challenged in court. The Biden administration later negotiated a new plan with California on how to divvy up the water.
This is basic stuff, so the fact that Trump describes this as Newsom refusing to sign some kind of document that never existed should give you a sense of how disengaged he is with his own policy.
Meanwhile, MAGA acolyte and soon-to-be Department of Government Efficiency co-leader Elon Musk used his X social media network—formerly Twitter—to amplify racist posts disparaging Democratic Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass, an antisemitic diatribe by defamatory conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, implicitly sexist and homophobic attacks on Los Angeles' fire chief, and his own frequent aspersions of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) policies.
Slate web editor Nitish Pahwa condemned MAGA's "conflagration of lies and disinformation."
"Just one day after Mark Zuckerberg announced that Facebook and Instagram would no longer be fact-checking informational posts, and mere months after nonstop online hoaxes obstructed federal efforts to assist North Carolinians in the recovery from Hurricane Helene, we're getting an early-year preview of how the United States is going to experience and respond to these rampaging climate disasters throughout the near future," Pahwa said.
"In the vacuum left by mainstream TV networks that did not at all mention climate change in their fire coverage, bad-faith digital actors swooped in with their own takes," Pahwa added. "Climate change doesn't just boost record weather events—it boosts the snake-oil salesmen, too."
Climate experts and defenders weighed in with science-based explanations for the increase in extreme weather events like the Los Angeles County wildfires.
As Common Dreamsreported earlier Thursday, Aaron Regunberg, Public Citizen's Climate Program senior policy counsel, noted that "a recent study found that nearly all of the observed increase in wildfire-burned area in California over the past half-century is attributable to anthropogenic climate change."
"This devastation is the direct result of Big Oil's conduct," Regunberg asserted.
As Fossil Free Media director Jamie Henn said, "This is exactly the sort of disaster that Exxon's own scientists predicted more than 50 years ago, but they spent billions to keep us hooked on fossil fuels."
According to the U.S. National Park Service, the area burned annually by California wildfires has increased fivefold since the 1970s.
One observer blasted MAGA's "conflagration of lies and disinformation."
Then-U.S. President Donald Trump speaks during a briefing on wildfires with local and federal fire and emergency officials in Sacramento, California on September 14, 2020.
(Photo: Brendan Smialowski/AFP via Getty Images)
Brett Wilkins
Jan 09, 2025
COMMON DREAMS
Progressive critics were left shaking their heads this week as Republican U.S. President-elect Donald Trump and his MAGA allies absurdly blamed the Los Angeles County wildfires on everything from an ichthyophile governor to diversity policies—while ignoring what experts say is the true cause of the deadly infernos.
On Wednesday, Trump took to his Truth social media platform to falsely accuse Democratic California Gov. Gavin Newsom—whom he repeatedly called "Newscum"—of refusing "to sign the water restoration declaration put before him that would have allowed millions of gallons of water... to flow daily into many parts of California, including the areas that are currently burning in a virtually apocalyptic way."
Newsom's office responded to Trump's accusation by correctly noting that "there is no such document as the water restoration declaration."
Trump also accused Newsom of wanting "to protect an essentially worthless fish called a smelt, by giving it less water," a red herring and false statement given that the state's plan to protect the endangered delta smelt actually involved increasing the amount of fresh water flowing into its habitat.
Jeffrey Mount, a water policy expert at the nonpartisan Public Policy Institute of California, toldMSNBC newsletter editor Ryan Teague Beckwith on Thursday that Trump got "nothing right" in his post.
Summarizing his interview with Mount, Teague Beckwith wrote:
Without getting into too much detail, here's what did happen... During Trump's first term, his administration sought to divert some of the water coming into a river delta near San Francisco to farmers in the San Joaquin Valley, among others. They came up with a plan for the water, which Newsom challenged in court. The Biden administration later negotiated a new plan with California on how to divvy up the water.
This is basic stuff, so the fact that Trump describes this as Newsom refusing to sign some kind of document that never existed should give you a sense of how disengaged he is with his own policy.
Meanwhile, MAGA acolyte and soon-to-be Department of Government Efficiency co-leader Elon Musk used his X social media network—formerly Twitter—to amplify racist posts disparaging Democratic Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass, an antisemitic diatribe by defamatory conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, implicitly sexist and homophobic attacks on Los Angeles' fire chief, and his own frequent aspersions of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) policies.
Slate web editor Nitish Pahwa condemned MAGA's "conflagration of lies and disinformation."
"Just one day after Mark Zuckerberg announced that Facebook and Instagram would no longer be fact-checking informational posts, and mere months after nonstop online hoaxes obstructed federal efforts to assist North Carolinians in the recovery from Hurricane Helene, we're getting an early-year preview of how the United States is going to experience and respond to these rampaging climate disasters throughout the near future," Pahwa said.
"In the vacuum left by mainstream TV networks that did not at all mention climate change in their fire coverage, bad-faith digital actors swooped in with their own takes," Pahwa added. "Climate change doesn't just boost record weather events—it boosts the snake-oil salesmen, too."
Climate experts and defenders weighed in with science-based explanations for the increase in extreme weather events like the Los Angeles County wildfires.
As Common Dreamsreported earlier Thursday, Aaron Regunberg, Public Citizen's Climate Program senior policy counsel, noted that "a recent study found that nearly all of the observed increase in wildfire-burned area in California over the past half-century is attributable to anthropogenic climate change."
"This devastation is the direct result of Big Oil's conduct," Regunberg asserted.
As Fossil Free Media director Jamie Henn said, "This is exactly the sort of disaster that Exxon's own scientists predicted more than 50 years ago, but they spent billions to keep us hooked on fossil fuels."
According to the U.S. National Park Service, the area burned annually by California wildfires has increased fivefold since the 1970s.
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