Mike Johnson Vows to Hold Aid to California Hostage After Deadly Fires

Republican leadership continues to use one of the worst natural disasters in U.S. history as political leverage.

On Monday, House Speaker Mike Johnson told CNN’s Manu Raju that there should be “conditions” on the proposed federal aid to California in the wake of the deadly wildfires in Los Angeles County.

“It appears to us that state and local leaders were derelict in their duty in many respects, so that’s something that has to be factored in. I think there should probably be conditions on that aid.”

Asked whether he planned on conditioning the aid to debt ceiling negotiations, Johnson said that option is on the table. “There’s some discussion about that, but we’ll see where it goes.”

Nearly 200,000 L.A. residents have been placed under evacuation order, and many won’t have homes to return to. Over 12,000 buildings—including a public library, a medical center, a church, a synagogue, and large swaths of a predominantly Black neighborhood—have been destroyed so far in the wildfires. At least 24 are dead, and likely counting. The total land burned in these Los Angeles wildfires is bigger than Paris.

In short, the wildfires are a devastating national catastrophe. For Johnson to so casually suggest that there should be any conditions at all on aid to the affected areas of California is absolutely cruel and unusual.

Johnson isn’t the only one. Senate Majority Whip John Barrasso told Face the Nation on Sunday that he expected “there will be strings attached to money that is ultimately approved, and it has to do with being ready the next time, because this was a gross failure this time.” He thinks that because the “policies of the liberal administration” had “made these fires worse,” the people of that administration should suffer too.

On Monday, Senator Ron Johnson told Wake Up America that he wouldn’t vote for any aid to California “unless we see a dramatic change in how they’re gonna be handling these things in the future.… These are decisions Californian Democrats have made.… It’s their fault.”

At the time of this writing, the fires continue to burn through Los Angeles County.

Florida Governor Ron DeSantis is already helping Donald Trump get his plan for mass deportations started.

On Monday, DeSantis called for state legislators to hold a special session to help the incoming Trump administration’s immigration plans, with the president-elect’s inauguration taking place in one week. The session will be the week of January 27, one week after Trump is sworn in.

“State and local officials in Florida must help the Trump administration enforce our nation’s immigration laws,” DeSantis said. “In order to do that effectively, we are going to need legislation to impose additional duties on local officials and provide funding for those local officials.”

DeSantis has suggested that he would take action against any elected officials who “neglect their duties” and do not work to implement Trump’s mass deportations. It wouldn’t be the first time for the Florida governor: DeSantis previously suspended State Attorneys Monique Worrell and Andrew Warren for opposing him.

The Florida governor said he plans to spend tens of millions of dollars in new funding to expand immigration detention, and would consider activating the Florida National Guard and the Florida State Guard to help with enforcement. All of these actions show that DeSantis has apparently buried the hatchet with Trump, who called him “Meatball Ron,” “Rob,” “Ron DeSanctimonious,” and “Ron DeSanctus” during the Republican presidential primaries.

Trump even called DeSantis a “groomer,” a slur akin to calling him a pedophile. But DeSantis warmed up to Trump last spring after his own presidential bid flopped, helping to fundraise for Trump when the then–Republican presidential nominee’s funds were dwarfed by Vice President Kamala Harris’s campaign fortune. DeSantis also looked the other way on whether Trump’s felony conviction allowed him to vote in the 2024 election.

DeSantis’s tenure in Florida has been criticized as authoritarian, and policy-wise, he’s quite close to Trump, so it makes sense that he would support the president-elect. Trump’s daughter-in-law Lara also happens to be angling for a Senate seat, which DeSantis can give her if Marco Rubio is confirmed as secretary of state. It seems that one of Trump’s scariest plans already has a powerful backer.

The Washington Post’s editorial board made the mind-boggling decision Monday to say they support all but four of Donald Trump’s Cabinet nominees, and their rationales were as unconvincing as they were brief.

“We would not have picked any of his choices for our hypothetical Cabinet. But, as we have argued for decades, that is not the standard we—or U.S. senators—should apply when evaluating potential executive nominees for Senate confirmation,” the paper’s editorial board wrote the day before Senate confirmation hearings were set to begin.

So, who exactly does the Post think shouldn’t make it? Fox & Friends host Pete Hegseth, anti-vaccine conspiracy theorist and failed presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr., former Democrat turned MAGA acolyte and possible Russian asset Tulsi Gabbard, and Project 2025 contributor Russell Vought.

Pretty good—or bad, that is—choices. Still, the struggling legacy paper being steered by a not-so-benevolent billionaire chose to greenlight the rest of Trump’s sorry cast of characters, who are also radically unqualified and ridiculous choices for their perspective positions.

The Post’s editorial board inexplicably insisted that attorney general nominee Pam Bondi “is qualified,” noting that “lawyers who have worked with her report that she is serious.”

But Bondi’s loyalty to Trump is no less than that of failed nominee Matt Gaetz, who was touted as an instrument of retribution against the president-elect’s political enemies. After the 2020 presidential election, Bondi joined forces with Rudy Giuliani to sow doubt about the results. She’s also a former Amazon lobbyist, so that could help explain why she got the nod from Jeff Bezos’s publication.

Meanwhile, Chris Wright, a fossil fuel executive and Trump’s pick for secretary of energy, was deemed passable because he simply “acknowledges that climate change is real.”

But in a 2023 video on LinkedIn, which was removed for containing “false and misleading content,” Wright claimed that “there is no climate crisis, and we’re not in the midst of an energy transition either. Humans and all complex life on earth is simply impossible without carbon dioxide hence the term carbon pollution is outrageous.”

Former World Wrestling Entertainment CEO Linda McMahon, Trump’s nominee for secretary of education, earned the short review of being the “other co-chair of the president-elect’s transition team [who] led the Small Business Administration during Trump’s first term.”

While that makes her qualified to implement the whims of the president-elect, it doesn’t mean she knows the first thing about education. Luckily for her, she may not have to, as her boss (and other Republicans) have hopes to shutter the Department of Education altogether.

Fox Business co-host Sean P. Duffy, who is Trump’s pick to be secretary of transportation, will “still need to study,” the board noted.

Scott Turner, a motivational speaker nominated as secretary of Housing and Urban Development, “has never run a big organization, but that is not disqualifying.” At a certain point, why bother writing anything at all?

To that point, several Cabinet-level officials, including Elise Stefanik, Lee Zeldin, John Ratcliffe, and Kelly Loeffler, did not even receive justifications from the paper but were given the go-ahead anyway. The Post editorial board has chosen to defend the appointment of loyalists because they lack egregiously disqualifying features, and not because they possess any qualifying ones.

Donald Trump has nothing but nice things to say about Senator John Fetterman after he went all the way to Mar-a-Lago to visit him over the weekend.

The Pennsylvania senator and Democrat said last week that Trump invited him for a meeting, and apparently the president-elect was impressed after an hour-long conversation with the man he once accused of abusing heroin, cocaine, crystal meth, and fentanyl.

“It was a totally fascinating meeting. He’s a fascinating man, and his wife is lovely. They were both up, and I couldn’t be more impressed,” Trump said to the Washington Examiner, referring to Fetterman and his wife, Gisele. “He’s a commonsense person. He’s not liberal or conservative. He’s just a commonsense person, which is beautiful.”

Fetterman has taken a major shift in his political ideology to the right in the last two years, particularly with his full-throated support for Israel’s ongoing massacre in Gaza. He’s lost a lot of Democratic support as a result, and even seemed OK with Trump’s crazy idea to annex Greenland, recently comparing it to the Louisiana Purchase.

Fetterman’s wife, Gisele, was once an undocumented immigrant, and has advocated for immigrant rights and the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, whose beneficiaries are called Dreamers. The Examiner didn’t mention if immigration was a topic of discussion during Trump and Fetterman’s meeting, but one wonders if she had anything to say on the topic.

The Pennsylvania senator has co-sponsored the Laken Riley Act, an extreme bill that would allow for the detention of undocumented immigrants merely accused of a nonviolent crime. The bill right now does not include any exceptions or protections for Dreamers. Has Fetterman turned so far to the right that he’s ignoring his own wife’s story—and is Trump secretly applauding him for it?

A small cohort of unelected Silicon Valley investors have been quietly helping Donald Trump and Elon Musk interview personnel for the incoming administration.

Marc Andreessen was among those directly involved in recruiting and interviewing efforts for positions in Trump’s incoming administration, three people familiar with the matter told The Washington Post, under the condition that they remain anonymous. Andreessen hasn’t just been making decisions about tech or economics, two fields which he might have some knowledge of—he’s also been advising on candidates for defense and intelligence posts as well, said one of the people.

The technocrat is one-half of Andreessen-Horowitz, a venture capital firm invested in tech companies, such as Facebook, Coinbase, and Musk’s X. Andreessen and Ben Horowitz announced their plans to support Trump in July. At the time, Andreessen claimed that his decision to support Trump did not “have anything to do with the big issues that people care about,” meaning immigration or inflation, but was motivated purely by his own personal gain as one of the self-proclaimed “world’s largest crypto investors.”

So, in addition to getting an administration that would alleviate some of the Biden administration’s pressure on cryptocurrency and other technologies (Andreessen said Trump’s victory felt like a “boot off the throat”), he has successfully bought himself a seat at the table.

As an investor in X and a fellow Silicon Valley ghoul, Andreessen has a personal connection to Musk, the unelected and unqualified czar of the Department of Government Efficiency, which seeks to remove unelected and unqualified federal employees. During an interview in a December episode of Bari Weiss’s podcast, Andreessen said that he was an “unpaid volunteer” for DOGE, and said the caliber of people he’d spoken with about government positions was “very high.”

Others technocrats who have been lending a hand with DOGE are Shaun Maguire, general partner of Sequoia Capital; Baris Akis, the founder of Human Capital; and Vinay Hiremath, the founder of Loom, according to The New York Times.

Hiremath described the highly technical process of working with DOGE in a very strange and personal blog post shared on X on January 2.

“Within 2 minutes of talking to the final interviewer for DOGE, he asked me if I wanted to join. I said ‘yes’. Then he said ‘cool’ and I was in multiple Signal groups,” Hiremath wrote.

“The next 4 weeks of my life consisted of 100s of calls recruiting the smartest people I’ve ever talked to, working on various projects I’m definitely not able to talk about, and learning how completely dysfunctional the government was. It was a blast,” he wrote.

He added that while the mission of DOGE was “extremely important,” he chose to leave the project after four weeks to focus on himself. “What is wrong with being insignificant? Why is letting people down so hard? I don’t know. But I’m going to find out,” he mused.

Like Andreessen, it seems that Maguire also paid for his seat at the table. He previously donated at least $500,000 to Trump’s campaign through Musk’s shady America PAC.

Donald Trump’s lobbyist friends are starting a nationwide campaign to convince the public that Republicans’ lopsided 2017 tax cuts—which benefited large corporations and the wealthy—should be renewed.

In a minute-long TV ad, the Koch-backed Americans for Prosperity, or AFP, described the Trump tax cuts as “a landmark law that gave hardworking Americans much-needed relief.” It then rattled off a list of statistics before blaming Bidenomics for inflation while scary music played.

AFP’s version of events goes against every piece of evidence that emerged after the tax cuts went into effect.

If the law is extended, households in the top 1 percent of income on average will receive tax cuts of more than $60,000, while households in the bottom 60 percent will get only $500, according to the Tax Policy Center.

“Wage growth is tepid … and gross domestic product growth is slowing and projected to revert to its long-term trend or below,” the Center for American Progress wrote in 2019. “Meanwhile, budget deficits are higher due to revenue losses—which have largely been triggered by the massive corporate tax cut at the heart of the TCJA [Trump’s tax cut bill].”

And yet AFP is committing to its own fictional story, even describing its Koch-funded initiative as “grassroots.” But not everyone is buying it.

“Americans for Prosperity is spending $20 million on a new ad campaign that champions the 2017 Trump tax law as a win for working families,” Patriotic Millionaires chair Morris Pearl told Common Dreams. “But don’t be fooled: What this Koch-backed group is really only after is protecting tax cuts for wealthy people like me.”

Some unexpected musicians are slated to perform at Donald Trump’s inauguration next week, including some with long histories of beefing with the president-elect.

So far, country singer-songwriter Carrie Underwood and disco group the Village People have agreed to perform at the forty-seventh president’s inaugural ceremony.

“We are announcing today that VILLAGE PEOPLE have accepted an invitation from President Elect Trump’s campaign to participate in inaugural activities, including at least one event with President Elect Trump,” Victor Willis, a founding member of the group, wrote on Facebook, arguing that the event would be an opportunity to bring the country together. “We know this wont make some of you happy to hear, however we believe that music is to be performed without regard to politics.”

That is in spite of the group’s legal history with the former president. Willis himself issued a cease and desist letter to Trump in 2020 after the Republican presidential candidate refused to stop playing “Macho Man” and the “Y.M.C.A.,” calling Trump’s repeated use of the song a “nuisance.” (Willis later defended Trump’s use of the song, claiming he didn’t “have the heart” to tell Trump to stop dancing to “Y.M.C.A.”)

The Village People were among dozens of artists who sued Trump for playing their music without permission (or compensation) at his campaign rallies. Other offended artists included Sinéad O’Connor, The Beatles, Adele, Bruce Springsteen, Elton John, Guns N’ Roses, Leonard Cohen, Queen, Prince, Pharrell, the Rolling Stones, The Smiths’ Johnny Marr, Rihanna, Neil Young, Linkin Park, the late Tom Petty, and Aerosmith frontman Steven Tyler.

Underwood, meanwhile, is expected to sing a rendition of “America the Beautiful” at Trump’s ceremony. The country music star has skirted political labels for years, but in 2017, she took an open jab at Trump during the Country Music Awards, parodying her song “Before He Cheats” to include a controversial line about Trump’s incendiary social media habits.

“And it’s fun to watch, yeah, that’s for sure/’til little Rocket Man starts a nuclear war … and then maybe next time, he’ll think before he tweets,” Underwood sang alongside Brad Paisley.

Still, in an interview with The Guardian in 2019, Underwood attempted to claim that her politics were undefined.

“I feel like more people try to pin me places politically,” she said at the time. “Everybody tries to sum everything up and put a bow on it, like it’s black and white. And it’s not like that.”

Trump struggled to find musicians to perform at his last inauguration, with reports circulating that some of his favorites—Céline Dion, Andrea Bocelli, Garth Brooks, and Sir Elton John—roundly rejected the invites.

Judge Aileen Cannon has slapped down an attempt to block special counsel Jack Smith’s final report on Donald Trump’s 2020 election subversion case.

That will effectively make Smith’s summation of the failed criminal investigation available to the public. The dissemination of Trump’s classified documents case will be set to a hearing, per Cannon’s Monday memo.

In a filing last week, Attorney General Merrick Garland outlined his intentions to publicize the memo, which constitutes “volume one” of Smith’s report. But Garland never intended to make the so-called second volume on Trump’s classified documents case public, instead planning to hand the report to the chair and ranking member of the House and Senate Judiciary Committees.

Cannon had initially ordered on January 7 that the Justice Department would not be allowed to release Smith’s final report on his two federal criminal investigations into the president-elect.

Cannon’s ruling stated that Garland, the Department of Justice, Smith, and “all of their officers, agents, and employees, and all persons acting in active concert or participation with such individuals” could not publish any part of the report until three days after the Eleventh Circuit ruled on the case.

The decision was a score for two of Trump’s co-defendants, Walt Nauta and Carlos De Oliveira, who argued that the release of the reports would cause “irreparable prejudice to defendants’ criminal proceedings.”

But the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals overturned Cannon’s decision last week, leaving Cannon with little option but to rescind her order.

The first volume of Smith’s report will likely become public after Cannon’s initial temporary injunction expires at midnight—unless the Eleventh Circuit intervenes again.

Smith concluded his investigations shortly after Trump won the November election. He resigned from the Justice Department last week.

This story has been updated.

In the weeks leading up to Mark Zuckerberg’s sweeping changes to Meta’s content moderation policies, the billionaire technocrat had plenty of time to talk to Donald Trump, but apparently no chance to run the decision past his oversight board.

Michael McConnell, a Stanford law professor on Meta’s oversight board, told NPR’s All Things Considered Friday that his advisory group had not even been consulted on the decision to remove content filters for some bigoted and dangerous language targeting women, ethnic and religious minorities, and people who identify as LGBTQ+.

“This actually came as a surprise to us. We did not know that they were going to be revising that standard,” McConnell said.

This is particularly troubling, considering that the oversight board’s primary function is to review cases on appeal from Meta users to see whether the company’s decisions are in line with its values—something that seem to be rapidly changing.

While Zuckerberg may not have floated Meta’s rightward policy shift past those involved in adjudicating those actual policies, he did apparently have plenty of time to talk to Trump.

Senator Markwayne Mullin told right-wing commentator Benny Johnson on an episode of The Benny Show Thursday that Zuckerberg had begun speaking regularly with the president-elect.

“Mark met with President Trump the day before he announced that they were going to change the way they do censorship, essentially,” Mullin said.

“The big announcement that he made the other day, President Trump, and spoke about that, and Mark had been down to see the president several times already,” the Oklahoma Republican added.

Elon Musk was fact-checked on his own livestream after making false statements about the California wildfires, and Gavin Newsom was quick to call out the tech mogul on social media.

In a post on X Sunday night, the California governor posted an excerpt from the livestream, where Musk was receiving a briefing with the command team handling the Palisades fire in Los Angeles. Musk asked an emergency official twice about water to fight the fires being available in the Malibu area but not in the Palisades.

The official corrected Musk, pointing out there was not a water shortage but that the fire required much more water than could be pumped.

Right-wing pundits and commentators have come up with a number of different reasons at the root of the wildfires, from attacking California Democrats for their “far-left policies” to making the racist claim that “DEI” was a major cause. In reality, while better prevention measures could have been taken, Musk, Donald Trump, and other conservative personalities are using the disaster to score political points without offering much help.

Even the conservative claim that better water management could have mitigated the wildfires doesn’t hold up. Experts in the area told CNN last week that the magnitude of these fires, among the worst in U.S. history, makes it impossible for even the best preparation and equipment to put out the blazes.

“I don’t know a water system in the world that is that prepared for this type of event,” Greg Pierce, a water-resource expert at UCLA, said to the network.

Musk, Trump, and conservative actor James Woods, among others, have all made the false claim that water reservoirs in the affected areas are empty, even as the state of California said they were “brimming.” It’s no surprise that Newsom would seize upon Musk getting corrected to his face by an emergency management official, on his own livestream to boot. Perhaps the tech mogul and the rest of the opportunistic right should stop spreading misinformation and leave the firefighting to the experts.