Trump Cares More About Starting Fights Than L.A. Fire Victims
Record costs for Globaloney. ‘Drill Baby Drill’
President-elect Donald Trump exploited a historic wildfire crisis to launch petty insults at a political opponent Wednesday as tens of thousands of Los Angeles residents fled the city’s worst natural disaster in decades.
“One of the best and most beautiful parts of the United States of America is burning down to the ground,” Trump wrote, in a late-night post to his Truth Social platform. “It’s ashes, and Gavin Newscum should resign. This is all his fault!!!”
“Newscum” is Trump’s self-fashioned epithet for California Gov. Gavin Newsom, who has feuded with the president-elect in recent months over a wide spectrum of policy issues.
Earlier in the day, in another Truth Social post, Trump spread the blame evenly between “the gross incompetence and mismanagement of the Biden/Newscum Duo,” roping President Joe Biden into an extended tantrum about the wildfires that began Tuesday in Los Angeles County.
Newsom lamented Trump’s antics. “People are literally fleeing, people have lost their lives, kids lost their schools, families completely torn asunder, churches burned down,” Newsom told CNN in an interview. “This guy wanted to politicize it.”
Other members of Trump’s Republican Party—like Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, who offered California prayers and assistance from his state—took a more traditionally diplomatic and nonpartisan approach to a crisis.
Trump, meanwhile, has insisted that California water policies under Newsom are responsible for the wildfires, claiming they better serve the endangered Delta smelt fish than the state’s residents.
One local expert said Trump’s hyper-partisan remarks don’t reflect the reality of California’s water systems.
“Tying Bay-Delta management into devastating wildfires that have cost people’s lives and homes is nothing short of irresponsible, and it’s happening at a time when the Metropolitan Water District has the most water stored in its system in the history of the agency,” Mark Gold, the water scarcity director for the Natural Resources Defense Council and a member of the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California’s board, told CalMatters.
The fires began and spread as a result of a combination of unusually strong winds and dry conditions.
“It’s not a matter of having enough water coming from Northern California to put out a fire,” added Gold. “It’s about the continued devastating impacts of a changing climate.”
“If only there were more rakes”
Trump has often rejected climate science, including during 2020 wildfires in California during his first term. “It’ll start getting cooler, you just watch,” he told the state’s Natural Resources Secretary, who asked him to consider global warming as a factor.
As of early Thursday morning, over 100,000 LA-area residents have fled, with five fires burning across the city.
Like “stable genius”, like son.
President-elect Donald Trump’s eldest son suggested Wednesday that Ukraine, which is over 6,400 miles away from Los Angeles and busy repelling an unprovoked Russian invasion, is to blame for the wildfires raging across America’s second largest city.
In a post on X, Donald Trump Jr. pointed to a donation of surplus equipment by the Los Angeles County Fire Department to the war-torn nation as a potential contributing factor to the five uncontained blazes currently scorching Los Angeles.
“Oh look of course The LA fire department donated a bunch of their supplies to Ukraine,” he wrote.
The donation was announced in 2022, when Ukraine was first subject to a full-scale invasion by Russia.
At the time, the department said it would send “hoses, nozzles, turnouts, helmets, body armor, and other associated personal protective equipment” to assist with shortages during the war.
L.A. fire officials have not cited a lack of equipment in their struggle to contain the wildfires, but rather a shortage of manpower.
“L.A. County, and all 29 fire departments in our county, are not prepared for this type of widespread disaster,” said Los Angeles County Fire Chief Anthony Marrone during a Wednesday press conference. “There are not enough firefighters in L.A. County to address four separate fires of this magnitude.”
Don Jr. is not the only MAGA fixture to have spread baseless conspiracies to score political points while the lives of tens of thousands of LA residents hang in the balance.
Trump’s billionaire backer Elon Musk claimed Wednesday, without evidence, that diverse hiring practices at the L.A. fire department were to blame, accusing officials of “prioritized DEI [diversity, equity, and inclusion] over saving lives and homes.”
And Musk announced a huge backtrack on his goal to cut $2 trillion from the U.S. budget in his role as the co-head of DOGE, Donald Trump’s proposed new advisory body which aims to slash waste and regulations to lower taxes.
Just another Republican campaign promise broken.