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.