Trump’s and Musk’s Disgusting Response to California Fires

Republicans are using the devastating California wildfires as an excuse to score cheap political points against Democrats and Governor Gavin Newsom, rather than focusing on providing sorely needed assistance.

Multiple wildfires are burning through Los Angeles County, killing two people and forcing tens of thousands to evacuate. President-elect Trump called the fires “virtually apocalyptic.”

“Governor Gavin Newscum refused to sign the water restoration declaration.… He wanted to protect an essentially worthless fish called a smelt,” Trump said on Truth Social. “I will demand that this incompetent governor allow beautiful, clean, fresh water to FLOW INTO CALIFORNIA! He is the blame for this.”

Elon Musk retweeted a conservative account attacking Newsom, while presidential envoy Richard Grenell tweeted, “The far left policies of Democrats in California are literally burning us to the ground. Stop voting for people who won’t use common sense water management and forest policies. I’m pissed off. You should be, too.”

Governor Newsom struck back on Tuesday. “My message to the incoming administration—and I’m not here to play any politics—is please don’t play any politics,” he said. “There’s a time and place for that.… The precious moments we have to evacuate, we don’t have any time for that mishegoss.”

There’s a lot of finger pointing coming from a party that has ignored climate change for decades while continuing to invest in the very fossil fuel industry that is helping warm our climate and heavily influencing this irregular weather pattern in the process.

Senator Dick Durbin, the top Democrat on the Senate Judiciary Committee, requested Tuesday that the Department of Justice scale back the president’s power to use the U.S. military domestically.

In a letter on behalf of the committee Democrats, Durbin urged Attorney General Merrick Garland to “withdraw certain legal opinions by The Department of Justice’s Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) relating to the allocation of war powers and foreign relations powers between Congress and the president.

“I request that the Department of Justice publicly release opinions and manuals pertaining to the domestic use of the U.S. military,” Durbin wrote. “For decades, OLC has issued guidance on the circumstances in which the President may deploy the military within the United States, as well as what servicemembers may do when so deployed.

“The American people have a right to know how the Executive Branch interprets the President’s constitutional and statutory authority to use the military domestically,” Durbin continued. “The need for transparency regarding these legal interpretations is particularly urgent today given the risk of domestic military deployment to suppress protests or carry out mass deportations.”

In a post on X, the committee Democrats alleged that there were five “flawed opinions” that had “run afoul of Congress’s critical check on presidential war powers” that needed to be rescinded.

It seems that Durbin and Senate Democrats are hoping to rein in Trump’s military powers ahead of his return to the White House later this month. Trump has previously claimed he will use the military to conduct sweeping raids as part of his mass deportation scheme. He has also threatened to turn the U.S. military against his political enemies and even foreign allies.

During a rambling press conference Tuesday, Donald Trump threatened that “all hell will break out” if hostages held by Hamas in Gaza aren’t released by his inauguration on January 20.

It’s a threat Trump has repeatedly made since early December, and he did not elaborate on what it means Tuesday, instead saying, “It will not be good for Hamas, and it will not be good, frankly, for anyone.” Last month, he promised “hell to pay” if the hostages weren’t released by his inauguration, seemingly threatening U.S. military action but making no mention of a Gaza ceasefire as a prerequisite.

If the “hell” Trump is promising is military action, it would inflame the Middle East further and likely set off a regional conflict that already includes Iran, Yemen, Syria, and Lebanon. In a phone call last month, Trump spoke to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, an accused war criminal, and reiterated the threat.

Throughout his presidential campaign, Trump has remarked that Israel should “finish the job” in Gaza, basically endorsing the country’s yearlong brutal military assault that has resulted in a humanitarian crisis and war crimes charges. What would further “hell” visited upon Gaza look like to a territory that has been reduced to rubble and tens of thousands of deaths?

The civilian death toll in Gaza has only continued to climb since then, with thousands of bodies trapped under rubble and indirect deaths caused by the destruction of infrastructure, including hospitals and food distribution systems. In October, 99 health workers who worked in Gaza sent President Biden a letter saying that they had “witnessed crimes beyond comprehension,” urging a U.S. arms embargo on Israel.

President Biden will leave office refusing to consider any action against Israel, instead planning an $8 billion arms sale to the country on his way out. Trump’s latest words confirm that his Israel-Palestine policy won’t be any better and in fact might exacerbate the ongoing genocide even further.

Los Angeles authorities placed roughly 179,000 people on evacuation orders as flames tore through the region. Five people were killed as a result of the blaze, which destroyed at least 1,300 structures and threatened 60,000 more. But even though the fires are literally in their own backyard, Los Angeles doesn’t appear to have prioritized its ability to respond to the fiery devastation.

The city’s 2024-2025 budget nixed about $17.6 million from the fire department, while increasing the budget for the city’s police force by $126 million, according to figures from the Los Angeles City Administrative Office.

The change in fire department funding from 2023-24 stemmed from a one-time purchase of breathing equipment and fire suits that had expired, according to a budget memo from the Los Angeles Fire Department.

But the 2024-25 budget also saw a notable change in how the fire department approached paying its employees, shifting $20 million from hiring additional firefighters to staffing overtime. The LAFD has spent significant sums on overtime since the pandemic, backfilling the shifts of employees who fell ill or were required to quarantine, according to the Los Angeles Times.

In a December memo, though, Fire Chief Kristin Crowley warned that the budget reduction had “severely limited the department’s capacity to prepare for, train for, and respond to large-scale emergencies, including wildfires.”

“Without this funding, pilot compliance and readiness are jeopardized, and aerial firefighting capabilities are diminished,” Crowley wrote. “Changes to the Air Operations Section impact the Department’s ability to adhere to current automatic and mutual aid agreements, provide air ambulance service, and quickly respond to woodland fires with water dropping helicopters.”

The shortage came to a head on Wednesday, when L.A. County Fire Chief Anthony Marrone acknowledged on emergency radios that the department was ill-equipped and understaffed to handle the raging flames.

“We tried to get them the help they needed,” Marrone said. “We’re doing the very best we can. But no, we don’t have enough fire personnel in L.A. County between all the departments to handle this.”

Staffing concerns have plagued the department for years, even though the city’s total fire budget was up by more than $50 million in year-over-year spending compared to the 2023-24 cycle, Los Angeles Councilmember Bob Blumenfield told Politico.

While the fire department’s budget change was deemed normal at city hall, considering the new equipment was a one-time purchase, the decision unfortunately comes at a time when state firefighting reserves are also facing serious heat. Depending on the year, low-wage incarcerated inmates compose somewhere between 30 and 40 percent of the firefighters with the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection—but their ranks within the reserve have been drained by the Covid-19 pandemic, according to the Los Angeles Times.

The LAPD, meanwhile, received millions in the city’s latest budget for salary increases in an apparent bid to prop up recruitment. The starting salary for new recruits jumped from $74,000 a year to more than $86,000, though even that base salary will rise to $94,000 a year by 2027, reported ABC News.

“We’re here today to lay out a path forward for Los Angeles,” Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass said of the proposed budget in April. “This budget continues our momentum toward change by prioritizing core city services, but using this as an opportunity as a reset, so that our budgets moving forward are more honest, transparent and more focused.”

Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders tossed some blame for the ongoing crisis at climate change deniers in Congress, slamming the country’s continued inaction against the “existential” threat.

“The scale of damage and loss is unimaginable. Climate change is real, not ‘a hoax.’ Donald Trump must treat this like the existential crisis it is,” Sanders wrote on X Wednesday.

But the incoming government is less than likely to prioritize green initiatives. Trump’s transition team has already prepared executive orders for the president-elect to once again withdraw the U.S. from the Paris Agreement, an international climate treaty limiting greenhouse gas emissions. What’s more, Trump reportedly resisted sending wildfire aid to California in 2018 because the state voted Democratic.

Republicans have also proposed nixing the nation’s clean energy programs, including dismantling the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022 in order to save some $700 billion from the federal deficit so that they can barely dampen the blow of extending Trump’s 2017 tax plan to the benefit of corporations. Nonpartisan budget groups predict that such a move that some nonpartisan budget groups predict could balloon the deficit anywhere between $5 trillion and $15 trillion. Killing President Joe Biden’s key legislative victory, however, would kill tax credits for electric vehicles and spur fossil fuel production on federally protected land.

This story has been updated to include more details on the Los Angeles Fire Department budget.

Donald Trump is strongly considering classifying Mexican drug cartels as terrorist organizations, CNN reported Wednesday. This designation would make it easier to use military force against them.  

The president-elect first floated this idea in 2019, but backed off after receiving backlash from Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador and his own Justice Department officials. 

“Basically, you take the gloves off, meaning it can be anywhere from having joint operations where you’re physically doing things or where you’re actively targeting, maybe once again through finances, you’re turning loose [the] DOJ and FBI,” Republican Representative Tony Gonzales said of the reintroduced idea. 

Gonzalez is right to a degree: Treating cartels as terrorist organizations would increase the angles of attack for the federal government, potentially creating a larger pool of defendants. But the brunt of this change would fall unjustly on immigrants. 

The designation would make it much harder for immigrants and asylum-seekers to gain access to the U.S. given the proximity they often have to exploitative cartel activity. Many immigrants travel through cartel territory on their way to the southern border, and often have to pay them a toll to do so. This would cause immigrants to violate a statute surrounding providing funds to terrorist organizations. 

If this comes to fruition, Trump and border czar Tom Homan would be making an already hostile situation even more contentious.