Responding to the Los Angeles area’s apocalyptic wildfires will be the first test of the newly minted Republican Congress.
After this past summer’s hurricanes left disaster funding running low, Congress will almost certainly have to allocate more funding to help Californians rebuild from what’s projected to be the costliest wildfire in modern California history.
But with Donald Trump offering only scorn and blame as Californians flee for safety and reckon with the loss of their homes, livelihoods, and possessions, it's unclear whether the incoming president will allow Congress to pass aid to help them rebuild.
In 2019, during Trump’s first term, he threatened to pull federal funding from California when it was being destroyed by yet another major fire.
In 2018, when yet more deadly wildfires swept through California, Trump refused to approve disaster aid for the state until his aides explained to him how many residents in the impacted areas voted for him.
“We went as far as looking up how many votes he got in those impacted areas … to show him these are people who voted for you,” Mark Harvey, Trump’s former senior director for resilience policy on the National Security Council staff, told E&E News last year.
What's more, it's unclear whether Republicans would even put disaster-relief legislation on the floor for a vote. Hard-liners in the GOP conference often demand funding offsets for disaster relief, complicating the passage of funding as Americans suffer.
House Speaker Mike Johnson was noncommittal when asked by a reporter on Wednesday whether his chamber is prepared to move on disaster relief in the wake of the fires.
“We haven’t addressed it yet,” Johnson told The Hill.
Meanwhile, rather than offering any consolation or promise to help California, Trump instead spent much of Wednesday spreading lies about the fires, hurling insults at California Gov. Gavin Newsom, and calling on the Democratic governor to resign.
"This is a true tragedy, and it's a mistake of the governor and, you could say, the [Biden] administration,” Trump told reporters on Capitol Hill, where he was meeting with Republican lawmakers to discuss how to implement his destructive agenda. “They don’t have any water.”
But experts say Trump is dead wrong both about the cause of the fire and about firefighters’ current inability to contain it.
“It’s not a matter of having enough water coming from Northern California to put out a fire. It’s about the continued devastating impacts of a changing climate,” Mark Gold, water scarcity director for the Natural Resources Defense Council and a board member of the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California, told Cal Matters.
Newsom's office, aside from helping coordinate the fire response, had to respond to Trump's lies.
"[Los Angeles Department of Water and Power] said that because of the high water demand, pump stations at lower elevations did not have enough pressure refill tanks at higher elevations, and the ongoing fire hampered the ability of crews to access the pumps. To supplement, they used water tenders to supply water—a common tactic in wildland firefighting. But broadly speaking, there is no water shortage in Southern California right now, despite Trump's claims that he would open some imaginary spigot," the governor's press office wrote in a post on X, where disinformation about the fire is spreading as fast as the blaze itself.
Newsom himself, in an interview with CNN’s Anderson Cooper, responded to Trump’s conduct.
“People are literally fleeing, people have lost their lives, kids lost their schools, families completely torn asunder, churches burned down—this guy wanted to politicize it,” Newsom said, adding, “I have a lot of thoughts, and I know what I want to say—I won’t.”
Trump was also complaining that he will have to deal with the recovery efforts once he is inaugurated on Jan. 20.
“NO WATER IN THE FIRE HYDRANTS, NO MONEY IN FEMA. THIS IS WHAT JOE BIDEN IS LEAVING ME. THANKS JOE!” Trump wrote in another unhinged Truth Social post on Wednesday.
Biden, meanwhile, spent his Wednesday meeting with Newsom and vowing to help Californians for as long as he is in office.
“We’re prepared to do anything and everything, as long as it takes, to contain the Southern California fires and help reconstruct. But we know it'll be a hell of a long way,” Biden wrote in a Wednesday post on X. “The federal government is here to stay as long as you need us.”
