Trump And Newsom Prepare To Battle Over Wildfire Relief

Authored by Susan Crabtree via RealClearPolitics,

President Trump is set to conclude the first regular work week of his second term by coming here to survey the devastation of the Southern California’s wildfires.

That’s the kind of things presidents do. But nothing about the last five days, from Trump’s swearing-in to the break-neck speed in which he moved to transform the nation’s political landscape, could honestly be described as regular. Now his willingness to trudge directly into the heart of the resistance to see the torched remains of Palisades and Malibu for himself seems a fitting coda to one of the boldest launches of a president’s second term in history.

And in a week consumed by political theater, Trump managed to generate even more drama by leaving California Gov. Gavin Newsom guessing as to whether the two will share the spotlight during his visit, considering their most recent war of words over water and wildfires – not to mention their increasingly spirited rivalry.

Last Sunday, when Trump announced plans to come here and “to see it and get it moving back,” it seemed like the two leaders might put aside their petty grievances and pot shots to focus on a joint federal-state rebuilding plan to deal with an ordeal that has claimed 28 lives and some 16,000 buildings – and is not yet over.

Instead, it’s uncertain whether Trump will greet the governor when he touches down in Los Angeles or ignore him altogether. And while new fires continue to ignite across California’s Southland, the region is now only one of several stops Trump plans to make Friday, between visits to hurricane-ravaged North Carolina and a touchdown in Nevada to thank voters for his victory there.

Newsom, who is widely considered a top contender for the 2028 Democratic presidential nomination, has complained publicly over the insinuation by Trump and House Speaker Mike Johnson that relief for California would come with undefined strings attached.

But the governor has offered an olive branch of sorts, pledging to approach their new relationship with an “open hand, not a closed fist” while continuing to hold a special state legislative session to Trump-proof California. Attorney General Rob Bonta, meanwhile, one day after Trump’s inauguration, joined New Jersey and Massachusetts in suing the Trump administration over its executive order ending birthright citizenship for children born in the U.S. to illegal immigrants.

Trump told Fox News host Sean Hannity Wednesday night that he “[hasn’t] even thought about” whether he’ll meet Newsom during the California visit. The next afternoon, Newsom told reporters he still didn’t know Trump’s plans for the trip. Pressed on whether the two men would meet Friday, Newsom said, “Well. I certainly plan on being there at the tarmac.”

Newsom is trying to shift the spotlight away from the myriad state and local failures and onto efforts he’s made over the last two weeks to protect Californians who’ve lost their homes from price-gouging rents, while also vowing to expedite the rebuilding process by removing the normal bureaucratic and costly environmental hurdles the state normally imposes. But Trump has issued blistering criticism of California’s government’s mismanagement and decades of water and environmental policies that have failed to help mitigate the impact of these deadly and destructive infernos when they hit.

Trump is seizing on the wildfires to gain an advantage in a first-term fight he lost with Newsom, an effort to send more water from Northern California to Central Valley farmers and to southern parts of the state. Trump has repeatedly ridiculed Newsom and California Democrats for trying to protect the endangered Delta smelt in their history of restricting the release of water across the state. In one of his first actions, Trump released an initiative to prioritize “people over fish,” an effort he described as “stopping radical environmentalism to provide water to Southern California.”

The president also has expressed urgency in helping bring Los Angeles back “with some of the best builders in the world,” ahead of the 2028 Olympic Games the city is hosting. He declared during his Hannity interview that he didn’t think the federal government should “give California anything until they let the water run [southward].” Trump also has suggested that Republicans in Congress could withhold the wildfire aid unless Democrats agree to a debt-limit increase.

Californian lawmakers, including Republicans, are stuck in middle, trying to bridge the divide to help their constituents rebuild.

Republican state Sen. Suzette Martinez Valladares, who represents the Santa Clarita area north of Los Angeles where the Hughes Fire broke out Wednesday, stood alongside Newsom at a press conference Thursday in which the governor touted the $2.5 billion in wildfire disaster aid appropriated by the state legislature.

Valladares said her constituents were lucky because so many fire-fighting resources have been deployed to the state that firefighters were able to contain the fire in the first 24 hours.

“When we respond to disasters, I do believe it’s always appropriate to put partisanship and politics aside,” she told RealClearPolitics Thursday night. “It’s really important to send a clear message to the Trump administration that disaster relief is not partisan.”

Valladares and several of her Republican colleagues are pushing back against the threats to place conditions on federal disaster relief for Californians.

“I don’t think it’s appropriate to do that, and a lot of Republican colleagues in the state legislature feel the same way,” she said.

At the same time, Valladares and her Republican peers are hitting Newsom and the Democratic supermajorities in the state legislature for rejecting or slow-walking a host of fire-prevention measures over the last two decades, including hurdles to prescribed burns and forest thinning.

California Senate Republicans Thursday released a 15-page document outlining their legislative record of “working to protect Californians, Homes, and Communities” from the increasing threat of wildfires, which have killed more than 150 Californians over the last decade and completely wiping out entire communities.

Two measures Valladares sponsored made that list, including extending a suspension of requirements imposed by the California Environmental Quality Act for a three-year period in order to facilitate prescribed burns, vegetation thinning, and fuel reduction projects on federal lands. The effort died on the Senate floor in 2021.

In 2021, Newsom vetoed another Valladares measure that passed with bipartisan support that would have required the state insurance commissioner to convene a working group of stakeholders to review the feasibility of allowing insurers to offer more affordable plans to help curb skyrocketing insurance costs and the epidemic of insurance companies dropping policies across the state.

Though the state legislature passed $2.5 billion in wildfire relief Thursday, Democrats in Sacramento voted to block $1 billion for wildfire prevention Republicans proposed.

“Their failure to invest in prevention directly lead[s] to the disastrous wildfires,” Californian Assemblyman Bill Essayli said in a Thursday post on X.com. “They would rather spend our tax dollars to fund healthcare for illegal immigrants.”

When it comes to fire prevention, Democrats’ efforts are focused more sweepingly – on combating global warming, which they hold responsible for the increase in wildfires. Valladares agrees that climate change has contributed to the increasingly destructive wildfires, but says that Democrats shouldn’t block prevention efforts that state elected officials can control.

“Newsom is known for his half-truths, which to me is not helpful,” she said. “L.A. has become a breakpoint [showing] where all of our issues in California have come from, and that’s a lack of accountability and mismanagement of fire mitigation to our insurance crisis to our housing crisis. It’s now time for California, its legislature, to do the right thing and not listen to the lobbyists of the environmentalists.”

Susan Crabtree is RealClearPolitics’ national political correspondent.