Why is Trump blaming Newsom for the Los Angeles fires?

I mean besides the fact that he’s an enormous piece of shit, who is willing to try to score political points in the middle of a massive natural disaster.

“He wanted to protect an essentially worthless fish called a smelt, by giving it less water (it didn’t work!), but didn’t care about the people of California,” Trump added in his Wednesday post.

“Now the ultimate price is being paid. I will demand that this incompetent governor allow beautiful, clean, fresh water to FLOW INTO CALIFORNIA! He is the blame for this,” he continued. “On top of it all, no water for fire hydrants, not firefighting planes. A true disaster!”

Newsom’s office hit back, saying Trump’s comments about a declaration are “pure fiction.” . . .

“As of this moment, Gavin Newscum and his Los Angeles crew have contained exactly ZERO percent of the fire. It is burning at levels that even surpass last night. This is not Government. I can’t wait till January 20th!” the president-elect said.

This may just be Trump’s bottomless pettiness and grudge-holding, but I can’t help but wonder if Trump sees Newsom as a likely opponent in the 2028 election. Yes that would be pretty insane, but pretty insane is a good description of everything about the Trump years, so ruling out the possibility that Trump may try to stay in office is pure Panglossian denial.

Meanwhile the situation in the LA area sounds truly horrible:

Officials are working to get Los Angeles residents out of the way as four wildfires burn in the county — all of which are 0% contained.

High winds and and drained resources are presenting challenges to crews battling the fires, which continue to spread rapidly.

Here’s where things stand with each of the fires:

• The Palisades Fire is the largest fire in the county right now, burning more than 11,800 acres, fire officials said. The bulk of the fire is in Pacific Palisades, located between Santa Monica and Malibu. It has destroyed at least 1,000 structures, according to Los Angeles County fire chief Anthony Marrone.
• The Eaton Fire has burned about 10,600 acres, according to California Fire. At least two people have died, Marrone said. More than 100 structures were destroyed by the Eaton Fire, and more than 13,000 still at risk, officials said.
• The Woodley Fire started on Wednesday and has burned at least 30 acres, fire officials said. This is revised from earlier reporting by California Fire that it burned 75 acres.
• The Hurst Fire, which started Tuesday night, has burned more than 500 acres, California Fire said.

It was almost exactly three years ago now that within a matter of a couple of hours a sudden wildfire burned down all of the neighborhood we had just moved out of, and seriously threatened our new home. It’s difficult to describe how apocalyptic these things are when you’re in or near them.

Trump’s reaction is completely unsurprising, of course, in that it’s exactly the way you might expect the worst person in the world to react.

. . . David Dayen:

The idea that you can bolster your infrastructure to handle unpredictable, out-of-control wildfires is very wishful thinking. The L.A. County Fire Department has admitted they were “not prepared for this type of widespread disaster,” and how could they be? We simply don’t have the infrastructure in place to deal with living in places that climate and drought and extreme weather have rendered unlivable, at least in part.

This is the ongoing culmination of a decades-long project of simply ignoring reality. Just in my 20 years of living in L.A., the changes in the climate are noticeable and stark. It’s a different place, and humans molded it that way. We have a ton of hard choices to make and a political and social culture that refrains from making them. It’s difficult not to feel something like despair at all of this. I’m a rational person who likes solutions, but what do you do when the solutions are unequipped for the flames?

David Wallace-Wells:

“There’s no number of helicopters or trucks that we can buy, no number of firefighters that we can have, no amount of brush that we can clear that will stop this,” Eric Garcetti, then the mayor of Los Angeles, told me in 2019. “The only thing that will stop this is when the earth, probably long after we’re gone, relaxes into a more predictable weather state.”

Seven of the eight largest wildfires in California history have burned since then.