‘A true disaster!’: Trump blames California governor for wildfires amid natural disaster
A conflagration in the California wilderness has been responsible for the destruction over a 1,000 homes and buildings and the death of at least two people. Rather than express sympathy for victims, Donald Trump laid blame on state governor Gavin Newsome.
In a post on Truth Social, Trump ripped into Newsom in a nonsensical tirade about the fires, California water, and “useless fish.” Referring to the governor as “Newscum” with middle school-bully aplomb, Trump raged that Newsom had jeopardized California’s fire response operations in favor of protecting smelt—a fish species local to the area—as part of a “water restoration declaration.”
Trump has ranted about the fish before. The president-elect has shown a bizarre obsession with laws surrounding the regulation of California’s water, which currently allocate half of the state’s water flow into natural runoff in order to protect the state’s wetlands, keep saltwater out of the Sacramento River delta, and yes, protect the endangered Delta Smelt that dwells there. Trump has frequently repeated the erroneous claim that California is simply “taking the water and shoving it out to sea,” seemingly unaware of how watersheds actually work.
According to Governor Newsom himself, the government of California is “making sure that firefighters have all the resources they need.” As for the “water restoration declaration” that Trump is rambling on about, Newsom writes that no such document exists, calling Trump’s claim “pure fiction.”
For all his bloviating, Trump has done little to support California in times of need. During the lead up to the 2024 election, Trump threatened to withhold wildfire aid from the state if Newsom didn’t change the water policy. Trump’s words drew harsh criticism from Newsom, who warned in a post on X that if Trump were to be elected, he would continue to “block emergency disaster funds to settle political vendettas.”
Trump’s political vendetta against Newsom is particularly longstanding, and set to deepen. In an effort to protect his constituents from Trump administration meddling, Newsom recently declared that he and state legislators were working round the clock to “Trump proof” California. Newsom’s efforts drew predictable ire from the president-elect, who wrote that Newsom was “trying to KILL our Nation’s beautiful California” in a Truth Social post.
Trump’s criticism of Newsom’s disaster relief response carries a particular irony if the president-elect’s first term in office is to be considered. The Trump administration failed spectacularly to administer aid Puerto Rico after the island was devastated by Hurricane Maria. According to a probe of made by the Department of Housing and Urban Development, that failure was by design—Trump administration officials were found to have purposefully blocked $20 billion in disaster relief funds from reaching the island. In a closed door meeting with Republican lawmakers, Trump himself said that the island was receiving an amount that was “way out of proportion to what Texas and Florida and others have gotten,” according to Sen. Marco Rubio, who was present at the time. Puerto Rico’s mayor Carmen Yulín Cruz said that Trump and his administration’s negligence led to the preventable deaths of thousands in the hurricane’s aftermath. “He can spin it all he wants — 3,000 people died on his watch.”
It’s likely that many more preventable deaths will occur if Trump continues to leverage disaster relief aid to in order to put a squeeze on his political opponents. “Donald Trump doesn’t care about America — he only cares about himself” Gavin Newsom once said about Trump – and Trump’s disaster relief response (or lack thereof) continues to make that fact abundantly clear.
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