...In
contrast to federal support for California under Biden, amid the ongoing crisis
President-elect Donald Trump blamed California governor Gavin “Newscum and
his Los Angeles crew” for the fires, suggesting he had put the needs of fish
over the people of California.
He
posted: “Governor Gavin Newscum refused to sign the water restoration
declaration put before him that would have allowed millions of gallons of
water, from excess rain and snow melt from the North, to flow daily into many
parts of California, including the areas that are currently burning in a
virtually apocalyptic way.” "Let this stand as a symbol of the gross
incompetence and mismanagement of the Biden/Newsom duo,” Trump posted. “January
20th cannot come fast enough!"
Newsom’s
office responded: “There is no such document as the water restoration
declaration—that is pure fiction. The Governor is focused on protecting people,
not playing politics, and making sure firefighters have all the resources they
need.”
Trump
is apparently claiming that water that could be used to fight the fires has
been diverted to protect the endangered Delta smelt. But the water systems in
California are complicated, and importing water from northern California would
make no difference for the wildfires.
Los
Angeles water doesn’t come from northern California. It comes from an aqueduct
east of the Sierra Nevada, from groundwater, and from the Colorado River. Right
now, the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California has more water
stored than it has ever had before, according to Mark Gold, a board member.
“It’s not a matter of having enough water coming from Northern California to
put out a fire,” he told Alastair Bland of CalMatters. “It’s about
the continued devastating impacts of a changing climate.”
Hydro climatologist Peter Gleick told Taryn Luna, Liam Dillon, and Alex Wigglesworth of the Los Angeles Times that Trump’s linking of water policy to the raging fires was “blatantly false, irresponsible and politically self-serving.”
The
two different responses of the current president and the incoming one reveal
dramatically different approaches to the presidency.
Yesterday
the Biden administration announced the finalization of a new rule that will
remove medical debt from all credit reports. Until now, medical debt has meant
that consumers could be denied mortgages, car loans, or small business loans.
In
addition, Vice President Kamala Harris announced that funds from the American
Rescue Plan, passed by Democrats shortly after Biden took office in 2021, have
enabled the elimination of more than $1 billion in medical debt for 700,000
Americans. Jurisdictions are on track to eliminate about $15 billion in medical
debt for nearly 6 million Americans, the White House said.
“No
one should be denied economic opportunity because they got sick or experienced
a medical emergency,” Harris said.
While
Biden and Harris are working to solve problems for regular Americans, Trump has
simply gone on the offensive, attacking Democrats for what he claims is their
mismanagement without offering any ideas of his own. “NO WATER IN THE FIRE
HYDRANTS, NO MONEY IN FEMA,” he posted. “THIS IS WHAT JOE BIDEN IS LEAVING ME.
THANKS JOE!”
By
now, we know that Trump goes on offense to hide his own shortcomings. As Judd
Legum of Public Notice pointed out, “The largest wildfire in
California history—the August Complex Fire, which burned more than 1 million
acres—occurred during the Trump administration.”
That
pattern of going on offense to hide his own behavior was also on display today
when CNN’s Hadas Gold reported that someone inside the Fox News Channel (FNC)
gave the Trump team the questions that Trump would be asked at an Iowa town
hall last January just before the Iowa caucus.
A
forthcoming book by Alex Isenstadt of Politico details the
close relationship between Trump and people within FNC. It says that after
Trump refused to prepare for that town hall, someone inside Fox texted the
questions to a senior Trump aide, enabling them to prep him with answers.
After
Trump fell apart during his debate with Vice President Harris, he accused her
of knowing the questions ahead of time and said the debate was “rigged.”
Trump
apparently went on the offensive yesterday when he called Supreme Court Justice
Samuel Alito just hours before Trump’s lawyers filed an emergency request with
the court asking it to stop Manhattan judge Juan Merchan from sentencing Trump
Friday in the election interference case in which a jury found him guilty of 34
felonies.
Alito
told reporters that they talked only about a job opportunity for one of Alito’s
law clerks and did not discuss the case, but it is highly unusual for a
president or president-elect to talk with a Supreme Court justice when that
official has business before the court. CNN’s Kaitlan Collins said such a thing
was “almost unheard of.”
As
legal analyst Quinta Jurecic observed, though, someone leaked news of this
inappropriate contact astonishingly quickly. Such news usually “has taken a
while to dribble out,” Jurecic noted, but “this happened THIS MORNING.
[S]omebody was smug or pissed off enough to go to the press right away.”
Trump’s
accusations that Biden committed a crime more likely to be chalked up to Trump
himself—taking bribes from a foreign company—was also in the news today.
Alexander Smirnov, the key witness for the House Republicans’ investigation
into Biden, was sentenced to six years in prison after pleading guilty to lying
to the FBI about the alleged bribery and to tax evasion.
Julia
Ainsley and Carol E. Lee of NBC News today reported another way in which Trump
is threatening to go on offense: by conducting a very visible raid targeting
undocumented immigrants in the Washington, D.C., area as soon as he takes
office.
While
Presidents Barack Obama and Biden have targeted employers who violate labor
laws, Trump wants to demonstrate “shock and awe” by raiding workplaces and
sweeping up migrants who are in the U.S. without documentation, regardless of
their criminal status. His transition team has been talking with U.S.
Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officials about the logistics of such
raids.
And
then, of course, there are Trump’s frequent references to taking over other
countries. Don Jr. traveled to Greenland this week with right-wing activist and
media personality Charlie Kirk, ostensibly to record a podcast, but Trump Sr.
followed the trip with posts saying “MAKE GREENLAND GREAT AGAIN!” That idea is
getting traction among MAGA leaders, even though—or perhaps because—it is a
direct affront to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), to which both
the U.S. and Denmark belong.
Over
the New York Post’s map of the “Donroe Doctrine” in which
Canada is labeled “51st state,” Greenland is labeled “our land,” the Gulf of
Mexico is labeled “Gulf of America,” and the Panama Canal is labeled “Pana-Maga
Canal,” the Republican majority on the House Foreign Affairs Committee posted
today: “Our country was built by warriors and explorers. We tamed the West, won
two World Wars, and were the first to plant our flag on the moon. President
Trump has the biggest dreams for America and it’s un-American to be afraid of
big dreams.” Journalist Jamie Dupree screenshotted the tweet before the
committee deleted it.
Behind
all the offense, though, things that matter deeply to the American people are
going largely unnoticed.
MAGA
representatives have been introducing a slew of measures to the new Congress,
many of which incorporate the plans of Project 2025 into legislation. They call
for turning over immigration to the states, privatizing veterans’ healthcare,
and repealing the 1993 National Voting Rights Act, the 2010 Affordable Care
Act, and the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act.
Bills
call for withdrawing the U.S. from the World Health Organization; increasing
oil and gas production on federal lands; abolishing the Internal Revenue
Service (IRS), the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (ATF),
and the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA); allowing states
to spend federal education money on private school vouchers; and removing the
protection of transgender rights from schools.
Other
measures would revoke security clearances for “certain former members of the
intelligence community,” introduce a constitutional amendment to cap the
Supreme Court at nine justices, and cut off federal funding to the Manhattan
District Attorney’s Office (the office that successfully charged Trump with
election interference) and the Fulton County (GA) District Attorney’s Office
(the office that has charged Trump with criminal conspiracy).
And
MAGA Republicans have proposed a bill to impose a national abortion ban, along
with a bill urging Congress to support a consortium of antiabortion doctors for
women because, the bill says, “health care should emphasize the whole woman,
including her physical, mental, and spiritual wellness,” and “health care for
women should also address the needs of men, families, and communities.”
—Heather
Cox Richardson
Notes:
https://www.axios.com/2025/01/08/california-fire-rare-climate-change-factors
https://www.newsweek.com/pacific-palisades-fire-donald-trump-gavin-newsom-california-2011882
https://calmatters.org/environment/wildfires/2025/01/la-fires-donald-trump-fact-check/
https://thehill.com/homenews/state-watch/5075334-trump-sparks-wildfires-battle/
https://www.cnn.com/2025/01/08/media/trump-fox-news-town-hall-questions-maria-bartiromo/index.html
https://abcnews.go.com/US/trump-speaks-justice-alito-amid-push-halt-criminal/story?id=117386419
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/08/us/politics/trump-inauguration-donors.html
https://www.congress.gov/bill/119th-congress/house-resolution/7/text
https://www.congress.gov/member/andy-biggs/B001302
Trump and Alito, two men who disdain ethical constraints,
chatted on Tuesday
Donald
Trump is a former president who is set to become president again on January 20
despite having faced four felony prosecutions from three different prosecutors
— one of which led to conviction — relating to actions he took when seeking the
presidency, while president, and after leaving the presidency…
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