As cataclysmic wildfires rage across Los Angeles, President-elect Donald Trump hasn't been offering much sympathy. Instead, he's claiming he could do a better job managing the crisis, spewing falsehoods and casting blame on the state's Democratic governor.
Trump has lashed out at his longtime political foe Gov. Gavin Newsom's forest management policies and falsely claimed the state's fish conservation efforts are responsible for fire hydrants running dry in urban areas. Referring to the governor by a derisive nickname, Trump said he should resign.
Meanwhile, more than 180,000 people were under evacuation orders and the fires have consumed more than 45 square miles (116 square kilometers). One that destroyed the neighborhood of Pacific Palisades became the most destructive blaze in Los Angeles history.
Trump v. Newsom: Round 2 was to be expected — the liberal Democrat has long been one of Trump’s biggest foils. But the Western fires are also a sign of something far more grave than a political spat or a fight over fish. Wildfire season is growing ever longer thanks to increasing drought and heat brought on by climate change.
Trump refuses to recognize the environmental dangers, instead blaming increasing natural disasters on his political opponents or on acts of God. He has promised to drill for more oil and cut back on renewable energy.
On Thursday, Trump said on social media that Newsom should “open up the water main” — an overly simplistic solution to a complex problem. “NO MORE EXCUSES FROM THIS INCOMPETENT GOVERNOR,” Trump said, adding, “IT’S ALREADY FAR TOO LATE!”
Standing on the street in a scorched subdivision as a home behind him was engulfed in flames, Newsom responded to the criticism when asked about it by CNN.
“People are literally fleeing. People have lost their lives. Kids lost their schools. Families completely torn asunder. Churches burned down, and this guy wants to politicize it,” Newsom said. “I have a lot of thoughts and I know what I want to say, but I won’t.”
In a post on his Truth Social media network, Trump tried to connect dry hydrants to criticism of the state’s approach to balancing the distribution of water to farms and cities with the need to protect endangered species including the Delta smelt. Trump has sided with farmers over environmentalists in a long-running dispute over California’s scarce water resources. But that debate has nothing to do with the hydrant issue in Los Angeles, driven by an intense demand on a municipal system not designed to battle such blazes.
About 40% of Los Angeles city water comes from state-controlled projects connected to northern California and the state has limited the water it delivers this year. But the southern California reservoirs these canals help feed are at above-average levels for this time of year.
Roughly 20% of hydrants across the city went dry as crews battled blazes, Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass said. Firefighters in Southern California are accustomed to dealing with the strong Santa Ana winds that blow in the fall and winter, but the hurricane-force gusts earlier in the week took them by surprise. The winds grounded firefighting aircraft that should have been making critical water drops, straining the hydrant system.
“This is unlike anything I’ve seen in my 25 years on the fire department,” Los Angeles Fire Capt. Adam VanGerpen told CBS This Morning.
Janisse Quiñones, head of the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, said the ferocity of the fire made the demand for water four times greater than “we’ve ever seen in the system.”
Hydrants are designed for fighting fires at one or two houses at a time, not hundreds, Quiñones said, and refilling the tanks also requires asking fire departments to pause firefighting efforts.
President Joe Biden, who was in California for an environmental event that ended up being canceled as the fires raged, appeared with Newsom at a Santa Monica firehouse on Wednesday. On Thursday, without naming Trump, he explained in a briefing how the hydrants had ended up dry, saying he was seeking to debunk rumors in “simple straightforward language.” In crisis, he said, "rumors and fear spread very quickly.”
“There is in case you haven’t noticed, there is global warming,” Biden said, adding “it’s not about the politics, it’s about getting people some sense of security.”
"Climate change is real,” he said emphatically.
Biden also quickly issued a major disaster declaration for California, releasing some immediate federal funds, and approved 100% federal funding for 180 days.
At a meeting of Republican governors at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago club in Florida on Thursday night, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis — Trump's GOP presidential primary rival in last year's primary — defended the president-elect and blamed the media for unnecessarily promoting controversy and political division between Newsome and Trump.
“I worked well with Biden during his time with natural disasters, and I worked well with Donald Trump," DeSantis said. "So, I’m very confident, as a state that knows — we face these — that a Trump administration is going to be very strong and going to be there for the people regardless of party.”
Still, any additional federal response will be overseen by Trump, who has a history of withholding or delaying federal aid to punish his political enemies.
In September, during a press conference at his Los Angeles golf course, Trump threatened: "We won’t give him money to put out all his fires. And if we don’t give him the money to put out his fires, he’s got problems.”
Trump’s support in California has increased in recent years, which could further embolden him in his tussles with Democratic leaders there. In 2024, he improved on his vote share in Los Angeles and surrounding areas hit by the fires by 4.68 percentage points. And while he still lost the state overall, he grew his overall margin by 4 points compared to the 2020 election.
As for the impact of the fires on Californians, Trump said areas in Beverly Hills and around it were “being decimated” and that he had "many friends living in those houses.” He framed the losses as a potential hit to the state's finances.
“The biggest homes, some of the most valuable homes in the world are just destroyed. I don’t even know. You talk about a tax base, if those people leave you’re going to lose half your tax base of California,” Trump said.
Associated Press Writer Maya Sweedler and Darlene Superville contributed to this report.
© Copyright 2025 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed without permission.
40 Comments
wallace
Trump's blame game is not what he will do when he takes over the problem.
stickman1760
Trump is such a disgusting human being. Can’t believe Americas elected this lowlife
lincolnman
About what we expected - typically nonsense, trash and vitriol from the MAGA Moron from Mar-A-Lago...
But this has to be the best belly laugh;
DeSantis added; "And for the record, contrary to what President-elect Trump has accused me of, my nickname is not "DeSoros", I haven't made Florida "one of the worst states to live in the US", and I have never used alcohol to "groom" high school students"...
lincolnman
What? Trump is blaming the Dem Gov and Mayor for California wildfires?
What happened to the MAGA-verse "scientific" explanation by MAGA-hero MTG and embraced by all "rational" people that is was "religious-funded space lasers" that were the cause?
https://x.com/JustinGrayWSB/status/1354870334655262724/photo/1
I guess that's old news....perhaps the new MAGA-official explanation is that it's Haitian immigrants using campfires to cook their stolen pets...
rainyday
Ah yes, that time Trump said California needed to rake up all the leaves on the forest floor to prevent forest fires just like they do in Finland, and then Finland said we don't actually do that because raking the forest floor to keep them free of leaves is an idiotic idea on its face. Classic Trump.
kurisupisu
Newsom The name of the treatment is responsible for rationing water to Californian farmland and to LA.
In a water starved state why are houses so close together and without adequate firebreaks in between?
Again, greed has trumped commonsense.
Trump is correct that Newsom is partly to blame for this disaster as well as human stupidity.
Wasabi
Negative person doing their best job here. And you have elected this one to country to job.....
Mr Kipling
All my homes have fire insurance, the one in Japan has earthquake insurance. Not cheap and I never want to use it but there is a reason I have it.
stormcrow
All thoughtless mouth, no kind heart.
What a president! This is gonna be an ugly 4 years for America.
bass4funk
Yes, absolutely!
“We need to do more and better,” he said at the time, promising the state would “step up our game” when it comes to forest thinning, controlled burns and other mitigation efforts aimed at protecting vulnerable communities — some of which were reduced to cinders this week as the fires devoured the long-uncleared brush.
https://nypost.com/2025/01/09/us-news/bass-newsom-ignored-past-warnings-about-la-wildfires/
Despite his tough talk, Newsom slashed and burned the state’s fire prevention budget by around $150 million — during one of its worst years for wildfires on record, according to an NPR report.
Even more galling, the governor shamelessly embellished the number of acres treated under his promised plan, claiming 90,000 acres were treated when the true figure was closer to 12,000.
The guy goes out during Covid, and while they're locked down and at home wearing masks, this guy mocks people and goes out to the most expensive restaurants and wines and dines at the people's expense, they already pay the highest taxes in the nation, and this is what they get for that?
And then the mayor....
On Thursday, Karen Bass — who took heat for being in Ghana when the blaze ignited — grew combative with reporters who questioned the efficacy of her crisis leadership, shifting blame to factors like the fierce Santa Ana winds that hindered firefighters’ progress, and even the fire hydrants.
Bass conceded that “of course” she was frustrated by the hydrants malfunctioning — many of which ran dry or provided abysmally low water pressure during the fire’s key early moments.
Then they actually run out of water and what is next to LA, West of it? The Pacific Ocean
https://www.forbes.com/sites/dereksaul/2025/01/08/theres-no-water-coming-out-of-the-fire-hydrants-billionaire-caruso-becomes-top-la-fires-critic/
Liberal logic is at its absolute worst. Well, their days are now numbered.
rainyday
Ah yes, if only LA had hooked its water main up to the Pacific Ocean the fire hydrants they feed would have enough water.
Clearly another case of the stupid libs and their woke policies against everyone having to drink and bathe in salt water getting in the way of common sense.
Tokyo Guy
We can count ourselves lucky that Trump is only president in name right now, and not in deed.
Otherwise, the standing order would probably be to send help, but to determine the political affiliation of the victims before providing assistance.
Ken
And yet Mark Kuckerbird is going to make Facebook into another Twitter. I always thought the factchecking was implemented because of the dumb nonsense people were believing on social media during the times of covid and to prevent more racism abuse but of course some people want to watch the world burn and make no attempt to help put out the fire literally and figuratively
bass4funk
Since 2017, Gavin had enough time to plan for this. He definitely took his time in planning to make his state a sanctuary state and Trump proofing it (whatever that means...) in the futile hopes he can stop Trump from deporting illegals, he had time to do all that to prepare, but he couldn't prepare his city for these natural disasters like this fire?!
In a nutshell.
rainyday
Just to clarify my understanding since you aren't pushing back on the point I was making, you mean to say that you actually think LA should have hooked its water main up to the Pacific Ocean - a salt water source - back in 2017 and are unaware of what I would have thought would be the blatantly obvious negative consequences of doing so?
Or is this just a random axe-grinding tangent about the libs on your part?
SomeWeeb
Yeah that's all they do here. There's 3 or 4 of them and I don't know if they are sock puppets or it's just
that nobody will listen to trumpies outside their own echo chambers on american media anymore.
SALT WATER CORRODES PIPES AND IF YOU USE IT TO PUT OUT FIRES IT LEAVES AN ECOLOGICAL DISASTER. Just to put it clearly for slow readers in all caps like Trump talks. Plus you're missing the part where the fire swept through so fast that it was literally burning buildings faster than they could hook a fire hose up.
bass4funk
MIS-understanding
No
No, it was typical liberal mismanagement of failed policies.
plasticmonkey
So why did you mention the Pacific Ocean?
bass4funk
Very true, but when you have nothing else, you do what you need to do to put out the fire because, looking at LA now, everything is corroded, rusty, burned, and poses an ecological disaster. Anyway, it doesn't help or absolve what Newsom didn't do.
Ken
These are the same people that think the climate crisis is a made up bedtime story. Unless Trump himself acknowledges that they wouldn't believe it they would find some way to blame Hillary or something
wallace
Sounds like Trump won't be doing much beyond his blame game and America First does not include California.
rainyday
Then could you explain to me the meaning of your criticism that LA shouldn't be running out of water by virtue of the fact that it exists next to the Pacific Ocean? This sentence here:
Whatever the failings of the lib/woke politicians you have a beef with, I fail to see how failing to harness the water of the Pacific Ocean to feed fire hydrants that are running dry is a critique that makes any sense.
plasticmonkey
They should put you in charge.
What didn’t he do?
Bad Haircut
In a state wracked and wrecked by Democrat mismanagement, the blame falls fair and square on the shoulders of Newsom and his ilk. Trump is pointing his finger in the right direction regardless of what the author of this cringeworthy hit piece thinks.
Speed
I'm sure this is endearing him to the thousands of non-super wealthy voters who have lost their homes. I don't think they give a damn about how much of a tax base they were to the state. More about memories and things unrecoverable.
wallace
Sounds like Trump won't be doing much beyond his blame game and America First does not include California.
Are you are saying Trump will use political blackmail to remove elected representatives before he gives a dim to the victims who are American-born taxpayers?
Damn, that's mean.
Wasabi
Some people will help and some will put gasoline on top of that. Guess what type is the next president?
Oh, I have my answer.
The_Beagle
Pacific Palisades was largely destroyed by fire in 1938, and in 1961 hundreds of homes burned there. This is a regular occurrence, which will of course be blamed now by academics on the burning of fossil fuels.
stickman1760
No governor in any state could have planned for this. It’s only the people on the right who politicize such a terrible human tragedy show some sympathy otherwise get lost.
Corey
Whether you are left or right, you should beware of “reporters” like this Colleen Long person for using terms like Trump “spewing falsehoods”. That’s an opinion and accusatory language - and there are columns reserved for strong opinions. These people are pretend-reporters.
bass4funk
BS, I was born and grew up in Cali, you absolutely can plan for that, as well all other natural disasters, Gavin just didn't do it
No, it's people on the right that called them on their BS and now they can't and should nevr run from it and always be confronted and ridiculed and held to account for what they did...or actually didn't do.
wallace
Are you saying Trump will use political blackmail to remove elected representatives before he gives a dim to the victims who are American-born taxpayers?
You are the one who said Trump will not give aid until elected representatives are removed.
Tokyo Guy
Whether you are left or right, you should beware of “reporters” like this Colleen Long person for using terms like Trump “spewing falsehoods”. That’s an opinion and accusatory language - and there are columns reserved for strong opinions. These people are pretend-reporters.
One dictionary definition of "spew" is "expel large quantities of (something) rapidly and forcibly". Given that every time Trump speaks, the chance of a lie coming out of his mouth is extremely high, "spew" is a perfectly suitable word in the context.
bass4funk
Yes, particularly if they decide not to cooperate in getting criminal illegals deported.
Tokyo Guy
This might get removed for "off topic", but nothing ventured...
I was born and grew up in Cali, you absolutely can plan for that, as well all other natural disasters, Gavin just didn't do it
Blacklabel
so who, by name, is accountable for this tragedy?
we don’t elect people to office to prevent such things anymore?
The_Beagle
An arsonist was held by citizens and detained by LAPD in the Kenneth fire.
bass4funk
There was footage of a man who was lighting something, he seemed to have been homeless.
stickman1760
Why didn’t the governors in North Carolina, Kentucky and Georgia do a better job of ‘planning” for the flooding and rain that hit their states this summer? Which resulted in incredible loss of life. Should they all be fired?
or do we give them a pass cos they are Republicans?
Cephus
"As wildfires rage in Los Angeles, Trump doesn't offer much sympathy. He's casting blame."
This is no more than killing the messenger because you don't like the message. President DJT, is right the Golden State is grossly mismanaged by incompetent, moronic leadership.