Los Angeles Wildfires Test How Democrats Aim to Counter Trump
(Bloomberg) -- Massive wildfires that incinerated broad swaths of Los Angeles are offering an early window into how President-elect Donald Trump plans to govern — and how Democrats eager to counter him intend to deal with the Republican.
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The blazes are on pace to be the most expensive wildfires in US history. They have killed at least 25 people and burned more than 12,000 structures. Total damages are estimated at $250 billion, a number that could rise as hot winds fuel the flames.
In response, Trump is deploying a familiar but politically potent playbook: seize on the anguish and despair of victims, weaken political opponents by painting the government as inept, and seek the upper hand in the inevitable negotiations over potentially tens of billions in aid.
Trump has levied baseless accusations, from erroneously accusing President Joe Biden of draining the Federal Emergency Management Agency of emergency funding to help undocumented migrants to casting Governor Gavin Newsom as hampering the flow of water resources to southern California. Newsom is considered one of Democrats’ top 2028 presidential contenders.
Separately, congressional Republicans have suggested linking disaster aid to state and federal policy changes they claim contributed to the fires or undercut the response. Speaker Mike Johnson on Tuesday questioned if Newsom’s decisions made the disaster “exponentially worse” and said lawmakers would consider the need for conditions on any aid.
Trump, for example, has long bemoaned environmental regulations designed to help fish species; while the rules have little impact on water availability in Los Angeles, they rankle Republican-voting farmers in California’s Central Valley. As the fires raged, the president-elect intimated without evidence that firefighting efforts had been hampered by state efforts to protect an endangered fish known as the delta smelt.
Others have suggested disaster aid should be conditioned to increasing the US debt limit, which could pave the way for Trump’s ambitious plans to extend sweeping tax cuts from his first term and secure additional cuts he promised during the campaign.
Meanwhile some of Trump’s closest allies — including billionaire Elon Musk, who has said he moved the corporate headquarters of X and Tesla Inc. to Texas in protest of California’s regulatory regime – took aim at unrelated Democratic policies they said lawmakers and officials were wasting time on, such as diversity, equity and inclusion practices.
That’s left Democrats, particularly those with presidential ambitions, trying to formulate a plan for how to respond to Trump.
Newsom, for his part, has undertaken a media blitz of his own, accusing Trump of spreading disinformation and daring him to visit the state. On Monday, Newsom rolled out plans for a $2.5 billion “Marshall Plan” to help Los Angeles rebuild. And he’s publicly aired concerns Trump could withhold disaster funding, and noted that he made similar threats, including to Republican states, during his first term.
“The hundreds of thousands of Americans — displaced from their homes and fearful for the future — deserve to see us all working together in their best interests, not politicizing a human tragedy and spreading disinformation,” Newsom wrote in a letter to Trump last week.
The result could be a political tightrope for both leaders.
Trump is considering a trip following his inauguration, and any interaction between the two would be closely scrutinized. Former New Jersey Governor Chris Christie’s embrace of then-President Barack Obama after Hurricane Sandy ultimately doomed him in the following Republican presidential primary, while Florida Governor Ron DeSantis’ awkward behavior alongside Biden after Hurricane Ian fed perceptions about his standoffish personality that resurfaced during the 2024 presidential race.
A similar fate could befall the California governor. But for Newsom, who has branded himself as a foremost Trump critic and relished opportunities to debate Republicans, the trip offers an opportunity to directly rebut the criticism levied by the president-elect while appearing to rise above the fray.
At a 2020 event in Sacramento, as a so-called “gigafire” burned over 1 million acres, Trump drew widespread criticism when he predicted that the earth would cool and said he didn’t “think science knows” how climate change would impact forests. The event, and Trump’s recommendation that California rake forest floors, became fodder for Democrats.
The two have also shown a capacity to bury the hatchet in the past. After the 2018 fire in Paradise, California, Trump threatened to withhold aid — but ultimately relented after visiting the state for a photo-op with Newsom.
The disaster could also weigh on the political prospects of another prominent Democrat, Vice President Kamala Harris, whose own Los Angeles home was placed briefly under evacuation orders.
Harris, who lost to Trump in 2024’s presidential election, is considered one of the party’s top candidates to replace the term-limited Newsom in 2026. While she remained loyal to Biden throughout her campaign, sometimes to her detriment, gaffes from her aging boss that can be read as insensitive risk providing ammunition to her future opponents.
At one White House briefing on the blazes, Biden encouraged guests to “fire away” as he called on them. After Harris shot him a look, Biden added, “no pun intended.”
Days before, when the president was in the Los Angeles area as fires swept through the city, Biden interrupted a separate briefing to announce that his granddaughter had given birth.
“The good news is I’m a great-grandfather as of today,” Biden said. “I’ll remember this day for a lot of reasons.”
Biden and Harris are also closely aligned with Karen Bass, the former congresswoman they both endorsed in her successful Los Angeles mayoral bid. Bass has earned the ire of residents for her handling of the fires, and in particular for being in West Africa to attend the inauguration of Ghana’s president — as a representative of Biden — when the Palisades caught fire.
Biden leaves office in days with historically low approval ratings and bears little risk of further political damage. But for Harris, the fires again raise questions about whether and how she should distance herself from the unpopular president she’s served alongside.
The impact of the political maneuvering could be felt well before the next presidential election with Congress likely to take up the question of an emergency aid bill alongside a funding bill that needs to pass by March 14 to avert a government shutdown. Biden on Monday estimated the cost to taxpayers would likely total “tens of billions” of dollars.
Congress appropriated $20.3 billion to the FEMA disaster relief fund for 2024.
If Democrats are able to rally public support behind aid for California, it could disarm any attempt to condition the assistance on raising the debt ceiling. Conversely, if Trump gets his debt-ceiling increase, it would remove a key restraint on his legislative ambitions and hobble some high-profile Democratic surrogates.
Trump indicated Monday he’d take credit for any reconstruction projects.
“I’m already putting my developer cap on,” Trump said in an interview with Newsmax.
--With assistance from Billy House.
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