Trump's thuggish response to the California fires is a bad omen
He still refuses to do the absolute bare minimum.
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Southern California is experiencing its most devastating winter fire season in more than 40 years. As of Sunday, ongoing wildfires have destroyed more than 12,000 homes and killed at least 24 people while burning through an area larger than San Francisco. Damages are likely to reach at least $135 billion, which would make this the most expensive fire in US history.
Disasters like this are horrific. They do, though, have the potential to pull Americans together. There has often in the past been bipartisan incentives to deliver aid quickly and efficiently to affected areas, whether in red or blue states. Local officials may reach across the political aisle to coordinate with national leaders, as when New Jersey Republican Gov. Chris Christie praised Barack Obama for the prompt federal response to Hurricane Sandy in 2012.
In the MAGA era, however, this kind of unity, or neighborliness, is anathema. Former and now incoming President Donald Trump and his cronies consistently treat national disasters as opportunities to sow division, to demonize and immiserate enemies, and to blackmail opponents.
Trump is not in office yet. But he and his minions are already using the fires to score cheap political points while Americans suffer. It’s an ominous reminder of, and prelude to, Trump’s mob boss approach to disaster relief in particular and to the presidency in general.
America will miss having a normal president
As has become standard during any national emergency, MAGA leaders have rushed to the internet to smear a range of people on their extensive enemies list. Part of the goal seems to be to deny the scientific consensus that wildfire seasons have been worsened by climate change. Another part of it, though, is just to revel in the misery of people who vote for Democrats and therefore are seen as deserving of torment.
Billionaire Trump apparatchik Elon Musk led the way by claiming, without any evidence, that the wildfire response was hampered by the promotion of unqualified people — which for Musk means anyone who is not a cishet white man like him.
“They prioritized DEI over saving lives and homes,” Musk insisted, without a shred of evidence.
Libs of TikTok posted a photo suggesting that women who do not appear to be cishet couldn’t possibly be qualified to work in leadership positions with the Los Angeles Fire Department. Her crude bigotry was then laundered into Fox News primetime by Jesse Watters, who built one of his monologues around it. (Watch below.)
Other large Trumpist social media accounts spread other baseless conspiracy theories. One said that California had spent money to help undocumented immigrants rather than building water storage facilities. Another made garbled claims that California had wasted money on cloud seeding, or artificially stimulating rainfall.
Of course Trump himself rushed to join the outflow of gaseous garbage. On Truth Social, he ranted that California did not have enough water to fight the fires because Gov. Gavin Newsom had chosen “to protect an essentially worthless fish called a smelt” and “refused to sign the water restoration declaration.” Trump continued to heap abuse on Newsom throughout the week and weekend, even as the governor worked to respond to an unprecedented disaster.
Newsom and his team responded to Trump by pointing out that what he was saying was nonsense — the “water restoration declaration” Trump referred to doesn’t even exist, for example — but the president-elect’s attacks created a political sideshow at a time when it’s the last thing California needs.
MAGA’s blast of self-contradictory and self-refuting nonsense would almost be amusing if it didn’t have the potential to compound the hardship. Trump in the past has repeatedly threatened to withhold California fire relief if Newsom and the state refuse to kowtow to his demands — deporting immigrants, reworking water policy, or whatever other half-baked priorities he has banging around in his orange skull.
In 2018, Trump initially delayed the approval of federal aid for fire relief for California — until he was shown voter registration data showing that there are in fact a lot of Republican voters in Orange County. He pulled similar stunts in both 2019 and 2020, demonstrating his childish understanding of environmental issues by saying things like, “You've gotta clean your floors, you've gotta clean your forests ... maybe we're gonna have to make them pay for it.”
Trump issued similar threats on the campaign trail last year, vowing during a September news conference in California that “we won’t give [Newsom] money to put out all his fires. And if we don’t give him the money to put out his fires, he’s got problems.” (Watch below.)
It would of course be unthinkable for Democrats to play politics with federal disaster aid flowing to a red state, but Republicans are following Trump’s lead. Rep. Warren Davidson (R-OH) echoed Trump’s threats, proclaiming on Fox Business last Friday that “California wants the money without changing the policies that are making the problem worse and I don't see how Republicans could possibly support that."
And yesterday, Sen. John Barrasso claimed that “the policies of the liberal administration out there I believe have made these fires worse” and said “I expect there will be string attached to money that is ultimately approved.” (Watch below.)
As NYT columnist Jamelle Bouie noted on Bluesky, “the all but official position of the Republican party is that voting for Democrats disqualifies you from federal disaster assistance.”
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The Trump tradition of not helping
Trump established in his first term that he doesn’t care if Americans suffer in national disasters and that he will ignore those in need, or work to make their plight worse, if it’s in his interest, or just if he feels like it.
Early in Trump’s first term, Puerto Rico was hit by Hurricane Maria, which devastated the island’s infrastructure and killed some 4,600 people. The Trump administration’s response was slow and inadequate, in part because Trump is an ignorant dope who staffed his administration with incompetent hacks.
When local officials criticized Trump, he did not try to do better. He simply smeared and attacked them, calling them “politically motivated ingrates.” He staged a photo op on the island where he threw paper towels to a waiting crowd. He also downplayed the horrific death toll and awarded himself an “A+” for crisis management.
The problem, in Trump’s eyes, was not that people were suffering. The problem was that some of those suffering people dared to question his actions or awesomeness.
Trump’s covid response followed the blueprint of his reaction to Hurricane Maria. Rather than trying to do everything he could to fight the virus, he put most of his energy into obfuscating the fact that his administration was flailing. He downplayed the virus, insisting in January 2020 that he had the situation “completely under control,” when he adamantly did not. In June, with the death toll spiking, he said he wanted to “slow the testing down, please,” because more testing would reveal more cases.
Even more disturbingly, there’s evidence that Trump wanted to ignore covid deaths initially because he thought that they would be restricted to blue states.
Some in Trump’s orbit reportedly believed “that because the virus had hit blue states hardest, a national plan was unnecessary and would not make sense politically.” Trump hoped to blame the governor of New York and other northeastern states, just as he is now blaming Newsom for the wildfires. He saw a pile of dead bodies not as a tragedy to be avoided, but as an opportunity. (Along similar lines, you might remember Trump’s public comments in March 2020 about how he didn’t want to allow covid patients off a cruise ship back onto the mainland because “I like the numbers being where they are. I don't need to have the numbers double because of one ship that wasn't our fault.”)
A cocktail of incompetence and malice
Trump is a fool who after a decade in national politics has made no effort to learn anything at all about how government functions, or about what it can and can’t do. He is uniquely ill-equipped to help people deal with national disasters because he is incapable of getting the federal government to function swiftly or efficiently, and because he simply doesn’t care about the misfortune of anyone other than himself.
For Trump, it is much easier to demonize those who are suffering than it is to offer aid. Since he has no interest and no ability to help people, he instead blames the victims of disasters, scapegoating others for his failures and attempting to extract concessions by kicking those who have been knocked to the ground.
Trump’s bumbling callousness in responding to covid was a big part of the reason he lost the 2020 election. But now he’s about to return to office, and as far as he’s concerned, his disaster response policy of failure, bluster, self-justification, and bullying has been vindicated.
If you face fire, flood, earthquake, or pandemic in Trump’s America over the next four years, you can rest assured that Donald Trump will be somewhere on safe ground, clutching a microphone or pounding away on a keyboard with his stubby fingers, laughing while you burn. That’s especially true if you live in a state like California where he believes the residents and their leaders don’t deserve help because a majority of them see him for the buffoon he really is.
That’s it for today
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Thanks for reading.
Now as much as this is the same old shit, what I'm noticing is just a near complete void of specificity in how Republicans are "attaching strings" to aid. Like Barasso, Hagerty, and Davidson said nothing in terms of what commitments or targets they would agree to. They might as well be saying people won't get a dime until and unless they elect a Republican mayor and governor in 2026. I mean, tell me if you heard anything else from them.
Not sure how that's going to remain tenable politically. There's only so much instant expertise in hydrology and fire ecology they can draw upon to make it sound like they know what they're talking about, definitely not enough to keep this shit up on the brass tacks.
Let us hope that Trump will help with recovery aid. If not, California should put joining Canada on the ballot after checking whether Canada would welcome a state with the 5 largest economy in the world after US, China, Japan and Germany, and a climate like California has. The fact that Canadian MP Elizabeth May said this, even as a response to Trump's calling Canada the 51st State, has led us to see that Blue states should economically stand together. At this point I see secession as something to seriously be considered. Canada is located in a way that it could hold them all together. Let those who do not want to secede, move to other states, like Texas. How about that for getting migrants. The Blue states leaving to join Canada, contiguous or not, would mean that the Red States would have less money to implement their hateful programs or support their military. Perhaps the media can decide whether they want to inform the people that the way Blue states run themselves they have better economies, so that Red State people are aware of this.