Days into his new administration, Donald Trump is locked in a wrestling match with a familiar foe, the California governor, Gavin Newsom. And despite the high stakes in the wake of the wildfires that have devastated Los Angeles, neither man is showing any sign of backing down.
Where many presidents in the past, regardless of party, have offered unconditional support and unlocked large sums of federal aid to help neighbourhoods devastated by the fires to recover and rebuild, Trump appears unable to forget that he is a Republican and Newsom the outspoken Democratic leader of the most populous state in the union.
From the moment the fires erupted on January 7th, Trump – who was expected to go to Los Angeles on Friday – hasn’t stopped attacking Newsom, accusing him of mismanaging forestry and water policy in his state and threatening conditions on any future federal aid to make him change course.
In his first interview on Fox News on Wednesday since taking office, Trump lumped Newsom in with the “radical left”, said he looked “like an idiot” on immigration policy and repeated his much-aired, inaccurate accusation that the main reason the fires in Los Angeles raged so fiercely was because firefighters had no access to water.
“It looked like our country was just helpless,” Trump told Sean Hannity from the Oval Office. “We look so weak.”
Newsom has not been shy about punching back, pointing out that the reservoirs in southern California were full when the fires erupted and that no amount of water could have contained brush fires whipped by 160km/h winds.
He has accused Trump of spreading “hurricane-force winds of mis- and disinformation” and urged him not to politicise the fires when both parties should be working together. “Our long national history of responding to natural disasters, no matter where they occur, has always been Americans helping Americans, full stop,” he wrote in a letter to congressional leaders last week.
Both sides know this is unlikely to be the case this time – not without a fight, anyway.
In the final days of the Biden administration, California took the precaution of securing an unusual amount of emergency federal aid, enough to cover the full cost of fire management and debris removal for 180 days when the standard immediate coverage is typically 75 per cent of those costs.
On Thursday, Newsom signed a $2.5 billion relief package that had garnered bipartisan support earlier in the day. It earmarks funds for the state’s disaster response efforts including evacuations, sheltering survivors and removing household hazardous waste. State legislators also approved $4 million for local governments to streamline approvals for rebuilding homes and $1 million to support school districts and help them rebuild facilities.
Los Angeles is likely to need much more federal aid, however, in particular to address long-term housing problems in a city already suffering a shortage of affordable homes. Trump and his congressional allies see this not as an obligation but as a political opportunity.
“I don’t think we should give California anything until they let water flow down from the north to the south,” Trump said in his Fox News interview, a talking point that has been repeatedly debunked. Congressional leaders, meanwhile, have said they want to link any future aid to a policy priority close to the heart of California Republicans – delivering less water to the cities and more to the farmers of the agriculture-rich Central Valley.
Newsom’s response has been swift and uncompromising. “Disaster assistance should not be delayed or denied based on how people voted. That would be un-American,” Newsom’s senior adviser Robert Salladay wrote in an email.
“We expect Congress to approve [future] aid without conditions. If there is a holdup for any political reason or added conditions, then the question is not what the governor can do to secure the money but why assistance for firestorm survivors is being held hostage.”
Many political and private-sector leaders have chosen to tread carefully around Trump, given his fondness for lashing out against perceived enemies and the power he wields with Republican majorities in both the Senate and the House of Representatives.
Newsom’s predecessor as governor, Jerry Brown, took a noticeably more low-key approach in 2018 when Trump was last president and California was hit by two major wildfires, one in the remote town of Paradise and the other in the hills above Malibu.
Brown told a television interviewer recently that his interactions with Trump had been “very limited but very positive”. It has since emerged that Trump was reluctant to grant disaster relief to California at the time until he learned that most voters in Paradise were supporters of his.
Newsom, by contrast, has relished his role as an outspoken antagonist of Trump’s and may have presidential ambitions of his own. Publicly, at least, he sees no conflict between needing to secure as much federal aid for Los Angeles as possible and maintaining a drumbeat of criticism against Trump.
“We will protect California against the flood of disinformation and assaults on our shared values, and work co-operatively with President Trump wherever possible,” Salladay, his senior aide, said. “It’s not hard to do both – the governor and President Trump did exactly that in 2019 and 2020, particularly during the pandemic.”
Three days into the fires, before Trump took the oath of office, Newsom invited him to visit the scenes of devastation in Pacific Palisades and Altadena, offering “an open hand”.
The governor’s staff now say Trump has accepted the invitation, but it is not clear when he will be coming or whether he will meet Newsom. Speaking to reporters on Thursday, Newsom said he has had no contact with the White House about Trump’s visit, but would nevertheless greet him at the airport tarmac.
Political and legal experts think it is unlikely that either Trump or the Republican-controlled House will seek to rescind the disaster aid already pledged to California by the Biden administration. It is possible, however, that the administration will slow down its distribution – not least because the first Trump administration did exactly that in the wake of Hurricane Maria, which hit Puerto Rico in 2017. A 2021 report showed that $20 billion in federal funds were held up after Trump told White House staff that he did not want a single dollar going to Puerto Rico.
Former aides have reported that Trump politicised disaster aid on numerous occasions during his first term, favouring states and regions that voted for him and offering help only reluctantly to areas that did not. “It was clear that Trump was entirely self-interested and vengeful towards those he perceived didn’t vote for him,” Kevin Carroll, the former senior counsel at the department of homeland security, said shortly before last November’s presidential election.
Los Angeles is no ordinary city in a Democratic-leaning state, however. The metropolitan area is home to 10 million people, with a disproportionate number of the famous and wealthy, Republican as well as Democrat, who use their money to wield considerable political clout.
“These problems are bigger than politics,” Rick Caruso, a billionaire developer, like Trump, who ran for mayor of Los Angeles as the conservative candidate in 2022, said in an interview with TMZ. “I’m hopeful they [Newsom and Trump] are going to rise above it and do the right thing.” – Guardian. Additional reporting: Bloomberg.
