Trump previously stated that the governor was responsible for the destruction caused by the wildfires in Los Angeles and called for his resignation.
California Governor Gavin Newsom accused President-elect Donald Trump of using the ongoing wildfire crisis for political gain, after Trump attributed the wildfires in the Los Angeles region to Newsom’s leadership.
In an interview with CNN’s Anderson Cooper on Wednesday, Newsom
stated: “Children have lost their schools. Communities have lost their churches. Families have lost their homes. Some have even lost their lives. And the president-elect’s reaction is to politicize it.”The governor commended President Joe Biden for his handling of the wildfires.
“I stood alongside the president of the United States today, and I felt proud to be with Joe Biden, who supported every single individual in this community; he didn’t engage in politics,” Newsom remarked.
Biden visited Los Angeles on Wednesday, where he met with Newsom and federal, state, and local officials at a fire station to get briefed on the situation.
After the briefing, Biden
approved a major disaster declaration for California, which will make federal funding available for emergency response costs.
The White House later announced on Wednesday that Biden had also
canceled a scheduled trip to Italy to concentrate on overseeing the federal response to the wildfires in California.
Newsom’s remarks were in response to Trump’s
statements made on Wednesday, which claimed that Newsom had declined to sign a water restoration plan that could have redirected millions of gallons of water from excess rain and snowmelt to areas of California currently affected by the fires.
Trump condemned what he referred to as “gross incompetence and mismanagement” by both state and federal governments in a series of posts on Truth Social.
He warned that the fires in Los Angeles could become the worst in U.S. history and expressed concern that some insurance companies might not have “enough to cover this catastrophe.”
There has been an
ongoing debate regarding whether California should divert water to the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta and San Francisco Bay for the protection of smelt and other fish or divert it to Central Valley farmers and cities in Southern California.
Trump, who has advocated for the diversion of water to farmers and residents in those areas, has had multiple confrontations with Newsom over this issue.
“He wanted to protect an essentially worthless fish called a smelt, by giving it less water (which was futile!),” Trump remarked, referring to Newsom. “Now we are all paying the ultimate price. … Furthermore, there’s a lack of water for fire hydrants and firefighting planes. A complete disaster!”
In a different
post on the same day, Trump reiterated that Newsom should resign.
Following Trump’s comments, Newsom’s office issued a
statement asserting that no water restoration declaration document exists and labeled Trump’s claims as “pure fiction.”
Newsom’s office emphasized that he “is concentrated on protecting people, not engaging in politics, and ensuring that firefighters are equipped with all necessary resources.”
On February 19, 2020, President Trump met with officials in Bakersfield, California, to sign a presidential memorandum aimed at enhancing water flow to the state, which included loosening protections for species such as the delta smelt.
The following day, California Attorney General Becerra filed a lawsuit against the Trump administration’s regulations. The
lawsuit alleged that the actions violated the Administrative Procedure Act and the National Environmental Policy Act.
“The lawsuit challenges the actions of the Bureau of Reclamation, the federal agency which adopted the biological opinions. It also contests the biological decisions issued in October 2019 by the National Marine Fisheries Services (NMFS) and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS), which were deemed insufficient in protecting endangered and threatened fish populations,” a statement from Becerra’s office on February 20, 2020, noted.
In May 2020, the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of California
issued a preliminary injunction that stopped the Trump administration’s plans, prompting a federal review of the contested biological opinions.
The Epoch Times reached out to a Trump spokesperson for comments but received no reply by the time of publication.
