Trump playing politics with wildfires is more bad news for Los Angeles ...Middle East

IN WASHINGTON – As Gavin Newsom spent last week coordinating California’s response to the historic wildfires in Los Angeles, it is a fair bet that the last thing he needed was incoming abuse from president-elect Donald Trump.

But the man who is a week away from being inaugurated in as America’s 47th President derided California’s governor – an influential Democrat believed to harbour presidential aspirations of his own – as “Gavin Newscum” in social media posts that laid the blame for the fires at Newsom’s door.

“One of the best and most beautiful parts of the United States of America is burning down to the ground…it’s ashes”, wrote Trump. 

“This is all his fault!!!” he insisted, a conclusion that he based on a series of inaccurate and false claims about Newsom’s record on water management in the state.

Over the weekend, Newsom went on the offensive. He issued an invitation to Trump to visit the areas devastated by the wildfires for himself.

He reminded the president-elect that six years ago, during Trump’s first term in the White House, they had jointly toured the devastation caused by the Camp Fire of November 2019 that killed 85 people and displaced 50,000 residents of northern California.

Newsom told Fox’s Los Angeles TV station that he was inviting Trump to the city “with an open hand, not a closed fist…I want him to visit and understand the magnitude of…what happened to the American people who happen to reside here in California. 

“I’m not interested in politicizing an event like this. I don’t like the venality of it, I don’t like the inhumanity.”

Newsom said he hopes to secure ongoing collaboration between the federal government in Washington and local authorities in California in order “to rebuild a community that has been completely ravaged”. 

Once Trump is back in the Oval Office, he will be lucky to secure it.

During his first term in office, Trump was regularly accused of politicising the government’s response to natural disasters and the Covid-19 pandemic, by rewarding states that had backed him in the 2016 election with federal largesse, and leaving Democratic Party governors largely out in the cold.

Some chose to shower him with flattery in an occasionally successful effort to secure the ventilators, masks, gowns and vaccines that their states required.

In September 2017, after Hurricane Maria devastated Puerto Rico and parts of America’s South, Trump lavished federal relief on Republican-led Georgia, but withheld $13 billion in federal aid for the Democrat-governed island that had been in the very eye of the storm.

Trump only yielded in September 2020, releasing funds to rebuild Puerto Rico’s electrical grids and public schools just two months before that year’s presidential election.

Looters dressed as firefighters arrested in LA as death toll rises to 16

On Thursday, President Joe Biden sought to tie Trump’s hands at least over the short term. He ordered the federal government to cover 100 per cent of California’s disaster response costs for the next 180 days. Calling the damage “catastrophic”, he said he had told Newsom and Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass – also a Democrat – to “spare no expense” in removing debris and providing shelter and assistance to affected families.

But any residents expecting federal assistance to rebuild in a part of the country where, thanks to climate change, wildfires are expected to intensify in the coming decades, may find no similar support provided by Trump.

First, the president-elect may view Newsom as a political threat, given the Governor’s probably plans to seek the Democratic Party’s nomination in the 2028 presidential election.

Secondly, Trump loathes the overwhelmingly liberal celebrity elites who made the now-destroyed Pacific Palisades and its environs their home, viewing them pillars of “woke” support for vice president Kamala Harris in last November’s election.

Trump has even false accused California of rigging elections against him. Last August, he told a television interviewer that “if Jesus Christ came down and was the vote counter, I would win California”, a claim that flies in the face of reality. Harris won the state with nearly 60 percent of the vote.

On Saturday night, Newsom announced that in the midst of dealing with one of the greatest crises ever to beset his state, he had launched a new website – CaliforniaFireFacts.com – to counter the stream of misinformation about the blazes being promulgated by Trump, Elon Musk and other figures in the President-elect’s inner circle.

That the website is even necessary is an extraordinary reflection of the misinformation politics at play in America. 

But in a week’s time, the country’s new president may begin withholding fresh assistance from the fire-ravaged region, or seek to force Newsom to make political concessions in exchange for the cash.

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