The wildfires ravaging Los Angeles have killed at least five, forced the evacuation of more than 100,000 people, and reduced entire neighborhoods to rubble. The Palisades blaze—which continues to burn mostly uncontrolled—is already the most destructive in the city’s history, and a new round of Santa Ana winds threatens to make the situation even worse. It is a still-unfolding tragedy, on what residents have described as an “apocalyptic” scale.
But to Donald Trump, it is apparently also an opportunity to score political points. As Southern California burns, the incoming president has repeatedly attacked the state’s governor, Gavin Newsom, writing in a series of social media posts that he and other Democrats are “at fault” for the natural disaster. “He is the blame for this,” Trump posted. “Gavin Newscum should resign.”
“It’s a mistake of the governor,” Trump added to reporters, as the inferno raged across Los Angeles. “I guess it looks like we’re going to be the one having to rebuild it.”
“Nobody has ever seen such failed numbers before!” Trump continued Thursday morning before he attended Jimmy Carter’s funeral in Washington. “Gross incompetence by Gavin Newscum and Karen Bass,” he said, referring to the Democratic mayor of Los Angeles who has faced local criticism for being in Ghana at the time of the fires. “LA is a total wipeout!!!”
The president-elect’s allies, including Elon Musk, have joined in the pile-on: “DEI means people DIE,” the billionaire Trump adviser wrote on the influential social media platform he owns, bizarrely—and baselessly—blaming the catastrophe on diversity policies.
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.
“People are literally fleeing,” Newsom said in response to Trump’s criticisms during an appearance on CNN. “People have lost their lives. Kids lost their schools. Families completely torn asunder. Churches burned down. This guy wanted to politicize it.”
This is, of course, Trump’s standard response to crises. We saw it on full display during Hurricane Helene last fall and, more recently, following the deadly truck attack on New Orleans. In both instances, he spread dangerous falsehoods that not only exploited Americans’ suffering for political gain, but complicated efforts to deal with those tragedies. Now, he’s doing it once again, using a calamity as grist for his long-running feud with the blue state leader and frequent critic. “I have a lot of thoughts about what I want to say,” Newsom told CNN Wednesday, “and I won’t.”
