As the Los Angeles wildfires proceed to trigger devastation throughout the state, Governor Gavin Newsom invited President-elect Donald Trump, who has railed towards the dealing with of the disaster with out offering believable options, to view the rising destruction himself.
In a letter signed “With respect and an open hand” that Newsom posted on social media on Friday, the governor gave Trump the chance to stroll across the state, thank first responders, and “meet with the Americans affected by these fires.”
“In the spirit of this great country, we must not politicize human tragedy or spread disinformation from the sidelines,” Newsom wrote, pointing to how the previous and future president has responded to the wildfires over this previous week. “Hundreds of thousands of Americans — displaced from their homes and fearful for the future — deserve to see all of us working in their best interest to ensure a fast recovery and rebuild.”
Newsom’s olive department comes as Trump has known as the governor “incompetent,” mentioned he ought to resign, and repeatedly referred to him as “Newscum” on Truth Social. On Wednesday, as neighborhoods have been burning down and tens of hundreds of Angelenos have been informed to evacuate with little discover, Trump wrote that the fires “may go down, in dollar amount, as the worst in the History of our Country.” He additionally expressed concern about “whether insurance companies will even have enough money to pay for this catastrophe.”
To date, the fires have killed not less than 11 folks and burned greater than 37,000 acres, an space larger than San Francisco, in keeping with reporting from the Washington Post primarily based on Cal Fire. The flames have taken greater than 12,000 constructions and displaced tens of hundreds.
As Vanity Fair’s Eric Lutz wrote this week, “The MAGA attacks on Democrats have been shameless and filled with flagrant lies, including Trump’s suggestion that FEMA money to aid Los Angeles has instead been spent by Joe Biden on the ‘Green New Scam,’ referring to the Green New Deal that was never actually enacted.”
The president-elect’s response mimics how he has responded to different environmental crises all through his political profession. According to Stephanie Grisham, who served because the White House press secretary beneath Trump from 2019 to 2020 and went on to help Vice President Kamala Harris’s 2024 marketing campaign, one of many first questions Trump would ask if a state wanted catastrophe support whereas he was in workplace was, “Are they my people?”
When Hurricane Maria struck Puerto Rico in 2017, which led to hundreds of deaths, Trump reportedly delayed catastrophe support and diverted funding from FEMA to pay for his effort to return undocumented migrants to Mexico. A 2021 report by the Housing Department’s Office of the Inspector General discovered the Trump administration held up greater than $20 billion in support for Puerto Rico after the storm ravaged the island. Instead of offering this money, he opted to throw paper towels right into a crowd at a church in San Juan.