The wildfires ravaging Los Angeles have killed a minimum of 5, pressured the evacuation of greater than 100,000 folks, and lowered total neighborhoods to rubble. The Palisades blaze—which continues to burn principally uncontrolled—is already the most destructive in the city’s history, and a brand new spherical of Santa Ana winds threatens to make the state of affairs even worse. It’s a still-unfolding tragedy, on what residents have described as an “apocalyptic” scale.
However to Donald Trump, it’s apparently additionally a chance to attain political factors. As Southern California burns, the incoming president has repeatedly attacked the state’s governor, Gavin Newsom, writing in a sequence of social media posts that he and different Democrats are “at fault” for the pure catastrophe. “He’s the blame for this,” Trump posted. “Gavin Newscum ought to resign.”
“It’s a mistake of the governor,” Trump added to reporters, because the inferno raged throughout Los Angeles. “I suppose it seems to be like we’re going to be the one having to rebuild it.”
“No one has ever seen such failed numbers earlier than!” Trump continued Thursday morning earlier than he attended Jimmy Carter’s funeral in Washington. “Gross incompetence by Gavin Newscum and Karen Bass,” he mentioned, referring to the Democratic mayor of Los Angeles who has confronted local criticism for being in Ghana on the time of the fires. “LA is a complete wipeout!!!”
The president-elect’s allies, together with Elon Musk, have joined within the pile-on: “DEI means folks DIE,” the billionaire Trump adviser wrote on the influential social media platform he owns, bizarrely—and baselessly—blaming the disaster on variety insurance policies.
The MAGA assaults on Democrats have been shameless and crammed with flagrant lies, together with Trump’s suggestion that FEMA cash to assist Los Angeles has as a substitute been spent by Joe Biden on the “Inexperienced New Rip-off,” referring to the Inexperienced New Deal that was by no means really enacted.
“Individuals are actually fleeing,” Newsom said in response to Trump’s criticisms throughout an look on CNN. “Folks have misplaced their lives. Youngsters misplaced their colleges. Households utterly torn asunder. Church buildings burned down. This man wished to politicize it.”
That is, in fact, Trump’s normal response to crises. We noticed it on full show throughout Hurricane Helene final fall and, extra lately, following the lethal truck assault on New Orleans. In each cases, he unfold harmful falsehoods that not solely exploited People’ struggling for political acquire, however sophisticated efforts to take care of these tragedies. Now, he’s doing it as soon as once more, utilizing a calamity as grist for his long-running feud with the blue state chief and frequent critic. “I’ve quite a lot of ideas about what I need to say,” Newsom instructed CNN Wednesday, “and I gained’t.”
