Opinion: Presidents shouldn’t play politics with wildfires

As (bad) luck would have it, both President Joe Biden and Gov. Gavin Newsom were in Los Angeles this week, arriving just in time for some of the worst wildfires ever to hit Southern California. Seeing the trail of death and destruction, Newsom did what any governor would do: He requested federal disaster aid. And Biden, seeing the same, did what most presidents would do: He quickly approved it.

“No politics. No hand-wringing. No kissing of the feet,” Newsom told reporters as a gigantic plume of black smoke billowed above his head and over the Pacific Ocean. “The president of the United States said, ‘Yes. What else do you need?’”

Newsom should be able to expect the same from the next president of the United States, Donald Trump. But he can’t. And that should matter to not only Californians, but all Americans who, thanks to climate change, are experiencing more weather-related disasters than ever and going broke trying to rebuild their lives and businesses.

In the first 10 months of 2024 alone, the U.S. recorded 24 disasters with losses topping $1 billion. They hit red states and blue states alike; wildfires, hurricanes, floods and tornadoes don’t discriminate. Mother Nature doesn’t care whether you are a Democrat or a Republican.

Trump, however, very much does. Recent history is littered with examples, from the 2018 California wildfires to hurricane-battered Puerto Rico.

Olivia Troye, a homeland security adviser in the first Trump White House, has divulged that local elected officials regularly sought out her help because Trump would refuse to sign documents approving federal disaster aid. Troye and another Trump 1.0 official, Mark Harvey, told Politico last year that Trump only wanted to send such aid to states and counties that voted for him. “We went as far as looking up how many votes he got in those impacted areas,” Harvey said. On the other hand, assistance to reliably red Florida and Alabama flowed freely.

Lest anyone think Trump has changed since then, it was only in September that Trump preemptively threatened to withhold disaster aid from California unless Newsom agreed to divert more water to farmers, who tend to be Republican.

“If he doesn’t sign those papers, we won’t give him money to put out all his fires,” Trump said during a press conference at his golf course in Rancho Palos Verdes, which is now under smoky skies on the west side of Los Angeles. “And if we don’t give him all the money to put out the fires, he’s got problems.”

Then in October, Trump tried to claim that, in the aftermath of Hurricane Helene, officials with the Biden administration were “going out of their way” to help people in North Carolina, led then by Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper, and were ignoring “Republican areas” in Georgia and South Carolina. Even the Republican governors of the latter two states denied Trump’s bogus assertion and praised the federal government’s disaster response.

So, it comes as no surprise that now that Los Angeles is on fire, Trump took to Truth Social on Wednesday to call Newsom “incompetent” and blame him for admittedly inexcusable problems with fire hydrants.

“(He) didn’t care about the people of California,” Trump wrote. “Now the ultimate price is being paid.”

Even Trump megadonor Elon Musk got in on the action. Arguing without facts on X, he wrote that wildfires — in this case, driven by winds of up to 100 mph and bone-dry conditions heightened by drought and climate change — “are easily avoidable, but nonsense regulations in California prevent action being taken, so year after year homes burn down and more people die.”

There is no doubt there are policy lessons to be learned from the wildfires that are still smoldering, but if such conflagrations were so easily preventable, we’d already have done that. As I write this, the sky is swirling in a sickly color of orange and gray, driven by wind that continues to whip through mountain passes and into neighborhoods rich and poor in unbelievable gusts. Flames are still erupting anew from homes in a city and a state that doesn’t have enough of them. Many more people will lose their insurance and won’t be able to rebuild the lives they once had.

The last thing anyone needs is to know their government will rate their worthiness for help based on how their county voted. It’s the sort of self-serving precedent that no president should set.

Newsom, asked about Trump by reporters, simply said this: “My message to the incoming administration, and I’m not here to play any politics, is, please don’t play any politics. There’s a time and place for that.”

Right now, Los Angeles isn’t it.

Erika D. Smith is a politics and policy columnist for Bloomberg Opinion. She is a former Los Angeles Times columnist and Sacramento Bee editorial board member.

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