The Los Angeles fires have also caused a political crisis. Firefighters are about to complete a week fighting the active fire outbreaks to the west and east of the city, which have already left 24 dead and at least 23 missing. Local authorities have hinted that to get out of the emergency they will need the help of Donald Trump, the president-elect and declared enemy of California, the great progressive bastion of the United States. The president-elect will arrive at the White House next Monday, January 20. According The Wall Street JournalTrump plans to visit Los Angeles late next week.
Trump has already been invited by local authorities to visit the areas affected by the fires, both Palisades as Eatonwhich have already destroyed more than 12,000 properties in the more than 15,000 hectares consumed. “I asked him to come to see the devastation with his own eyes, to interview and hear the stories of the victims and thank the rescuers for their work, but more importantly, to see how the federal government can help heal and rebuild communities,” said Kathryn Barger, the supervisor of Los Angeles County, the main administrative body of the metropolitan region, populated by almost 10 million people, on Sunday.
Gavin Newsom, the governor of California and one of the country’s leading Democratic politicians, has expressed concern about the possibility that Trump’s imminent arrival in Washington will mean a decrease in federal aid launched by Joe Biden’s Administration. “He has done it in Utah, in Michigan, in Puerto Rico. He tried to do it here in California before I was governor… He’s done it for years. “It’s his style,” the governor said on Sunday in an interview with NBC. Newsom has also invited Trump to go to the disaster area.
Some high-profile Republican politicians have floated the idea that aid to California should be conditional. “It is my personal point of view, but we will see if there is consensus,” Mike Johnson, the president of the House of Representatives, said on Monday. The legislative leader also attacked state and local authorities, accusing them of negligence due to poor water management, errors in forest control and “all kinds of problems.” “There will be conditions on the money, if it is approved,” Republican Senator John Barrasso, one of the leaders of Trump’s party in the upper house, also said in an interview.
It already happened in 2018
The episode Newsom refers to occurred in mid-2018, when the California fire season destroyed almost 800,000 hectares and left 103 dead in different parts of the State. Last October it was revealed that Trump then refused to approve the federal disaster declaration, a bureaucratic step necessary to allow the transfer of resources to assist victims. The then president only changed his mind when one of his advisors convinced him, showing him that in some of the affected regions, such as wealthy Orange County, Trump had more votes than in states like Iowa, a Republican stronghold.
That threat appears again in this emergency, which is on its way to becoming one of the worst tragedies that California has ever experienced. “People need help. They are desperate. “People who are not insured are worried about not receiving the help they need to rebuild their homes,” said Barger, an independent politician who is still awaiting a response from the next Administration, on Monday. FEMA, the federal emergency response agency, has multiplied its presence in the Los Angeles regions destroyed by the fires so that the thousands of affected people can begin their requests for help in the final eight days of the Biden Administration. As of this Sunday, some 26,000 people had begun the process.
Trump has not responded publicly to the invitations made to him from California. Instead, he has used social media to criticize the governor of California and still-President Biden. “Let this serve, and let it be emblematic, of the great incompetence and mismanagement of the Biden/Newscum duo (Trump’s nickname for the governor, translatable as ‘Gavin New Garbage’)”, Trump assured Wednesday, changing Newsom’s last name to call him “trash.” On Saturday he returned to the fray. “The fires continue to destroy Los Angeles. The incompetent have no idea how to extinguish them,” the president-elect wrote on his network, Truth Social.
The right has also been responsible for fueling accusations against the Democrats of their responsibility in the fires. One of them was Elon Musk, who made a live video while speaking with two firefighters from Cal Fire, the state fire department, responsible for coordinating the response. The tycoon tries again and again to get them to claim that there was no water in Pacific Palisades to fight the fire, one of the hoaxes that the Republicans have promoted. “We were using an amount of water that the system could not support,” responds the firefighter, who disagrees with Musk, who has become a powerful advisor to Trump.
The mayor of Los Angeles, in the pillory
Karen Bass has perhaps been the local politician most affected by her response to the emergency. The mayor of Los Angeles, the first black woman to hold the office, was in Ghana when the fire Palisades It started growing Tuesday morning. The politician went to Africa to take part in the inauguration of Ghanaian President John Mahama, despite the fact that three years ago he promised to reduce foreign travel as much as possible and focus on the city. Despite this, he was absent from the first appearances of the local authorities.
Bass also faces strong criticism for the decrease in the budget of the local fire department, an issue that has been exposed in the midst of the crisis even by its fire chief, Kristin Crowley. The mayor approved a 2025 budget of $819 million, which included $23 million less than last year.
The cut mainly eliminated 73 bureaucratic positions that were vacant and reduced the pool of 7.9 million to pay firefighters for overtime. Pressure from the firefighters union, however, ended up raising the extra pay for firefighters, which ultimately made the budget higher than that of 2024 by $53 million. Still, Crowley said in a memo in December that the amount not allocated to administrative positions represented “unprecedented operational challenges.”
This Monday, Bass said that he is focusing on the emergency and the safety of Angelenos in the face of the return of strong winds. Once the crisis has passed, he assured, there will be a detailed evaluation of his budget. “You will see then that there were not the cuts that they are saying,” he told a journalist. Meanwhile, their city is still burning.
