Will Trump Just Let California Burn?

Hell on earth. Photo: September Dawn Bottoms

Right now, as Los Angeles deals with a horrendous wildfire emergency, Donald Trump is just an extremely unhelpful critic of the people trying to save lives and homes. The torrent of abuse and misinformation he is spewing is unfortunate but not calamitous. But in ten days he will become once again the president of the United States, and his intensely politicized approach to natural disasters, particularly in blue states like California, will become highly relevant to real-life outcomes.

This isn’t a new problem; Trump’s first administration struggled with natural disasters, in part because the 45th president wasn’t particularly interested in helping people who in his judgment had made poor choices in state or local leadership (or in presidential voting patterns, for that matter). But for the most part his grousing about this or that group of ingrates didn’t greatly interfere with the largely nonpartisan machinery of disaster response and recovery.

But the intensity of the blame game he and his supporters are currently playing with respect to the alleged responsibility of “Gavin Newscum” and various tree-hugging, farmer-hating Democrats has surpassed all precedents. Trump has been threatening since September to suspend all disaster assistance to California, as Politico reported:

In his first term, Trump did delay disaster aid to California and other states based on political spats with their leaders. In one case, as POLITICO’s E&E News first reported, White House aides changed Trump’s mind when he was refusing to sign off on aid by showing him voter registration maps to demonstrate that many Republicans lived in Orange County, which had burned during wildfires in 2018.

In September, Trump said he would continue to use federal disaster aid as a political cudgel.

“We won’t give him money to put out all his fires,” Trump said in a press conference at his golf course near Los Angeles. “And if we don’t give him the money to put out his fires, he’s got problems.”

There’s no question that Trump and California’s leaders have real policy differences on water-resource and forest management that are exacerbated by wildfires. But there’s little or no merit to Trump’s current campaign to blame the fires ravaging Los Angeles on state-engineered water shortages; the reservoirs serving that area are at near-capacity. You also don’t have to be a tree-hugging liberal to acknowledge that climate change is playing a big role in the wildfires specifically and in California’s wildly swinging patterns of rainfall, heat, and wind. But it’s more convenient for MAGA folk to identify allegedly poor disaster management with everything they dislike about Democrats, including such remote targets as the Los Angeles fire departments diversity hiring efforts, as Forbes reports:

[Elon] Musk has reposted various posts on X that attempt to link the fire department’s DEI initiative to the spread of the wildfires, including a post Wednesday night that “DEI means people DIE,” though he hasn’t provided evidence that the fire department’s DEI initiative diverted resources from fire prevention.

Fortunately for California, the Biden administration has acted quickly to issue a presidential disaster declaration and move federal resources to the state; there’s only so much Trump can do to reverse those decisions. But if he chooses to subordinate disaster efforts to his broader battles with California’s state and local governments, he can do a lot of damage to a suffering area of the country when federal policies and future allocations of federal funds are determined. As CalMatters observes, there remain potential obstacles in the federal funding pipeline:

A president can slow down the process of approving aid, or not declare a disaster, a decision critical to a state receiving federal relief funding. A 2021 federal report found that the Trump administration delayed $20 billion in disaster aid to Puerto Rico after Hurricane Maria in 2017.

Federal funding typically pays for around 75% of the costs of rebuilding public infrastructure such as roads, sewers, water systems, parks and fire stations, officials say. That means California would have to come up with billions of dollars in additional money after major disasters if Trump follows through on his campaign rhetoric.

Since it’s unlikely Trump and California’s Democratic elected officials are ever going to kiss and make up, this saga of recriminations and blame-shifting will surely continue. Residents of the Golden State really need a four-year respite from the weather gods.