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Trump Blames L.A. Wildfires on Newsom Using Familiar Tactics
When enormous wildfires began to menace Los Angeles, the incoming president did not use his social media site to pledge support to emergency responders or offer words of compassion to a city where thousands of people have lost everything.
Instead, President-elect Donald Trump used his megaphone to tell the world who was at fault.
It wasn’t the Santa Ana winds, nor was it the rising temperatures that have dried out vegetation and made fires harder to extinguish.
The culprit, he wrote, was “Gavin Newscum.”
The Los Angeles fires have killed at least 11 people, reduced thousands of structures to ash and burned more than 36,000 acres, an area larger than the footprint of San Francisco. It’s the kind of devastation that, in a bygone era, might have prompted at least a temporary political cease-fire and pledges to work across the aisle to rebuild, even as the authorities face legitimate questions about their handling of the crisis.
Instead, with 10 days until Trump’s second inauguration, he offered a reminder of how he has long used disasters to damage political opponents like Gov. Gavin Newsom, Democrat of California — even when they’re still going on.
“What this feels like is, the man hasn’t changed an inch,” said Carmen Yulín Cruz, the former mayor of San Juan, Puerto Rico, whom Trump described as “nasty” when they tangled over the federal response to the devastation of Hurricane Maria on the island in 2017.
But it’s not just about hurting his political foes. Trump has always been a master of tapping into people’s angst and projecting it far and wide for his benefit — and there is a lot of angst in Los Angeles right now.
‘Why is he doing this?’
Residents in Los Angeles are angry that water systems never designed to fight so many threatening fires have run dry. They are mystified that Karen Bass, the Democratic mayor, wasn’t in the city when the blazes began. They are scared for their lives and fearful that the institutions they have come to rely on, like insurance, won’t make them whole on the other side of this.
This week, Trump has called for Newsom to resign, blamed other Democrats like President Biden and Mayor Bass and said incorrectly that the Federal Emergency Management Agency had no money to respond to the disaster because of the “Green New Scam.”
It’s a revival of a tendency he displayed during his first presidency, when he injected his personal politics into once-sacrosanct concepts like providing federal disaster aid to areas no matter whether they were blue or red. He told aides he wanted to stop money from reaching Puerto Rico after Maria, claiming that the island’s leadership was corrupt, and publicly insulted Cruz.
“At the beginning, I thought, ‘Why is he doing this?’” Cruz told me in an interview today. She suspected, she said, that it was because she was a Latina and a woman who had challenged his federal response to the disaster in her city. “It can be distracting, but it wasn’t distracting because I very clearly saw that it gave me an opportunity to talk about what was really going on in Puerto Rico.”
(He also struggled to manage the optics of his own response, like when he traveled to the island and hucked paper towels into the crowd.)
He also fought extensively with California. After the state’s devastating wildfire season of 2018, he tweeted that he had ordered FEMA to “send no more money” unless the state changed its approach to forest management. He has clashed on and off with Newsom over issues like water management and federal aid ever since.
In a text message last fall, Newsom told my colleagues that Trump often seemed to expect personal treatment before the state could receive aid, saying he was “publicly threatening, playing his politics — looking tough … forcing a call, a ‘transaction’ in his mind — reminding you in process who’s in control, why he matters.”
Beyond withholding aid, Trump has used disasters as political ammunition on the campaign trail. After a train derailed and spilled toxic chemicals in East Palestine, Ohio, in early 2023, he used the site as a backdrop to hammer the Biden administration, helping his presidential campaign pick up steam.
And last fall, when Hurricane Helene slammed into Georgia and North Carolina, he made a series of false claims about the federal disaster response as he sought to depict the Biden administration as hapless and even biased against Republicans who were in harm’s way.
Unavoidable politics
Trump’s defenders say there is no reason he shouldn’t bring up politics in a moment irrevocably shaped by them.
“We will have a fire, and there will be winds to blow the fire, but what determines the flow of the fire and the infrastructure capability of the fire department to fight, it is on them,” said former Speaker Kevin McCarthy, a California Republican, referring to the Democratic leadership of the city and the state.
He added: “In a time of crisis, people look at their electeds for leadership. How do you think they’re doing? They’re blaming somebody else. They say you can’t ask these questions. They’re not in town — they can’t answer why something happened.”
James Gallagher, who serves as the Republican leader in the State Assembly and represents Paradise, a Northern California community that was devastated by the Camp Fire in 2018, said there was deep frustration that more hadn’t been done to reduce wildfire fuel in the state.
Climate change exacerbates conditions that can lead to wildfires, he said, but he blamed Democrats’ leadership for inadequate management of the dry brush that can fuel fires. (Trump has discussed this in the past, although his recent posts have focused more on his dispute with Newsom over water management, which California officials say would not have changed the circumstances around the fires.)
“The politics are wrapped up in some very substantive policy,” Gallagher said.
“We’ve been saying this for a long time — maybe we don’t have as big of a megaphone” as Trump, he added.
The US is planning to board and seize Iran-linked oil tankers and commercial ships in the coming days, according to a Saturday report by The Wall Street Journal.
The report noted that these actions would take place in international waters, potentially outside of the Middle East.
The US “will actively pursue any Iranian-flagged vessel or any vessel attempting to provide material support to Iran,” US Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Dan Caine said. “This includes dark fleet vessels carrying Iranian oil.”
“As most of you know, dark fleet vessels are those illicit or illegal ships evading international regulations, sanctions, or insurance requirements,” Caine continued.
Caine was further quoted as saying that the new campaign, which would be operated in part by the US Indo-Pacific Command, would be part of a broader US President Donald Trump-led campaign against Iran, known as “Economic Fury.”
White House spokeswoman Anna Kelly told the WSJ that Trump was “optimistic” that the new measures would lead to a peace deal.
The potential US military action comes as Iran tightens its grip on the Strait of Hormuz, including attacking several ships earlier on Saturday, the WSJ reported.
The report cited CENTCOM as saying that the US has already turned back 23 ships trying to leave Iranian ports since the start of its blockade on the Strait.
The expansion of naval action beyond the Middle East will provide the US with further leverage against Iran by allowing it to take control of a greater number of ships loaded with oil or weapons bound for Iran, the report noted.
“It’s a maximalist approach,” said associate professor of law at Emory University Law School Mark Nevitt. “If you want to put the screws down on Iran, you want to use every single legal authority you have to do that.”
Iran claimed earlier on Saturday that it had regained military control over the Strait, intending to hold it until the US guarantees full freedom of movement for ships traveling to and from Iran.
“As long as the United States does not ensure full freedom of navigation for vessels traveling to and from Iran, the situation in the Strait of Hormuz will remain tightly controlled,” the Iranian military stated.
In addition, Iranian Supreme Leader Mojtaba Khamenei declared on Saturday in an apparent message on his Telegram channel that the Iranian navy is prepared to inflict “new bitter defeats” on its enemies.
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By Jodi Kantor, Alexandra Ostasiewicz, June Kim and Luke Piotrowski
April 18, 2026
A Pakistani Ranger walks past a billboard for the U.S.-Iran peace talks in Islamabad on April 12, 2026. The talks, led by Vice President JD Vance, produced no concrete movement toward a peace deal.
Farooq Naeem/AFP via Getty Images
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Farooq Naeem/AFP via Getty Images
Despite stalled talks with Iran and a fragile ceasefire nearing its end, President Trump expressed optimism this week that a permanent deal is within reach — one that may include Iran relinquishing its enriched uranium. However, experts who spent months negotiating a nuclear agreement during the Obama administration say mutual mistrust, starkly different negotiating styles make a quick truce unlikely.
Referring to Vice President Vance’s whirlwind negotiations in Islamabad last week that appear to have produced little beyond dashed expectations, Wendy Sherman, the lead U.S. negotiator on the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) nuclear deal finalized in 2015, says the administration’s approach was all wrong.
“You cannot do a negotiation with Iran in one day,” she told NPR’s Here & Now earlier this week. “You can’t even do it in a week.” To get agreement on the JCPOA, she said, it took “a good 18 months.”
The talks leading to that deal highlighted Iran’s meticulous style of negotiation, says Rob Malley, who was also part of the JCPOA negotiating team and later served as a special envoy to Iran under President Joe Biden.
Summing up the two sides’ differing styles, Malley said: “Trump is impulsive and temperamental; Iran’s leadership [is] stubborn and tenacious.”
U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry speaks during a news conference on the Iran nuclear talks deal at the Austria International Centre in Vienna, Austria on July 14, 2015.
Pool/AFP via Getty Images
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Pool/AFP via Getty Images
In 2015, patience led to a deal
The talks in 2015, led by Secretary of State John Kerry and Iran’s Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif, culminated with a marathon 19-day session in Vienna to finish the deal, says Jon Finer, a former U.S. deputy national security adviser in the Biden administration. Finer was involved in the negotiations as Kerry’s chief of staff. He said his boss’s patience “was a huge asset” in getting the deal to the finish line, he said.
Mohammad Javad Zarif, Iran’s foreign minister during the negotiations for the Obama-era nuclear deal, speaks on April 22, 2016 in New York.
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“He would endure lectures … ‘let me tell you about 5,000 years of Iranian civilization’… and just keep plowing ahead,” Finer said, adding that a tactic of Iranian negotiators seemed to be “to say no to everything and see what actually matters” to the U.S.
“They’re just maddeningly difficult,” he said. “You need to go back at the same issue 10 or 12 times over weeks or months to make any progress.”
Even so, Finer called the Iranian negotiators “extremely capable” — noting that, unlike the U.S., they often lacked expert advisers “just outside the room,” yet still mastered the details of nuclear weapons, nuclear materials and U.S. sanctions.
“They were also negotiating not in their first language,” Finer added. “The documents were all negotiated in English, and they were hundreds of pages long with detailed annexes.”
Vance’s trip to Islamabad suggests that the U.S. doesn’t have the patience for a negotiation to end the conflict that could be at least as complex and time-consuming. “The Trump administration came in with maximalist demands and actually just wanted Iran to capitulate,” Sherman, who served as deputy secretary of state during the Biden administration, told Here & Now. “No nation – even one as odious as the Iran regime – is going to capitulate.”
Distrust but verify
Iran was attacked twice in the past year. First in June of last year, as nuclear negotiations were ongoing, Israel and the U.S. struck the country’s nuclear facilities. Months later, at the end of February, Iran was attacked again at the start of the latest conflict. This time around, “the level of trust is probably almost at an all-time low,” Malley said.
“It’s hard for them to take at their word what they’re hearing from U.S. officials,” Malley said. The Iranians, he said, have to be wondering how long any commitment will last and “will be very hesitant to give up something that’s tangible” – such as their enriched uranium – in exchange for anything that isn’t ironclad or subject to suddenly be discarded by Trump or some future president.
“Once they give up their stockpile … they can’t recapture it the next day,” Malley said.
Even during the 2013-2015 nuclear deal talks, the decades of mistrust between Tehran and Washington were impossible to ignore, Finer said. “Our theory was not trust but verify — it was distrust but verify,” he said, adding: “I think that was their theory too.”
Malley cautions about relying on the JCPOA as a guide to how peace talks to end the current war might go. The leadership in Tehran that agreed to the deal is now gone — killed in Israeli airstrikes, he says. The regime’s military capabilities are also greatly diminished and “whatever lessons were learned in the past … have to be viewed with a lot of caution, because so much has changed,” he said.
Negotiations have a leveling effect
Mark Freeman, executive director of the Institute for Integrated Transitions, a peace and security think tank based in Spain that advises on conflict negotiations, says several factors shape the U.S.-Iran relationship. Going into talks, one side always has the upper hand, he says, but negotiations have a leveling effect. “The weaker party gains just by virtue of entering into a negotiation process,” he said.
Each side is looking for leverage, he adds.
In Iran’s case, it has used its closure of the Strait of Hormuz to exert such leverage, while the White House has shown an eagerness to resolve the conflict quickly. “If one side perceives the other needs an agreement more … that shapes the entire negotiation,” he said.
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