As the Los Angeles wildfires continue to cause devastation across the state, Governor Gavin Newsom invited President-elect Donald Trump, who has railed against the handling of the crisis without providing plausible alternatives, to view the growing 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 opportunity to walk around 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 former and future president has responded to the wildfires over this past 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 branch comes as Trump has called the governor “incompetent,” said he should resign, and repeatedly referred to him as “Newscum” on Truth Social. On Wednesday, as neighborhoods were burning down and tens of thousands of Angelenos were told to evacuate with little notice, Trump wrote that the fires “may go down, in dollar amount, as the worst in the History of our Country.” He also expressed concern about “whether insurance companies will even have enough money to pay for this catastrophe.”
To date, the fires have killed at least 11 people and burned more than 37,000 acres, an area bigger than San Francisco, according to reporting from the Washington Post based on Cal Fire. The flames have taken more than 12,000 structures and displaced tens of thousands.
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 other environmental crises throughout his political career. According to Stephanie Grisham, who served as the White House press secretary under Trump from 2019 to 2020 and went on to support Vice President Kamala Harris’s 2024 campaign, one of the first questions Trump would ask if a state needed disaster aid while he was in office was, “Are they my people?”
When Hurricane Maria struck Puerto Rico in 2017, which led to thousands of deaths, Trump reportedly delayed disaster aid 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 found the Trump administration held up more than $20 billion in aid for Puerto Rico after the storm ravaged the island. Instead of providing this cash, he opted to throw paper towels into a crowd at a church in San Juan.
