Politics

The start of the Palisades and Eaton fires: 24 hours that changed Los Angeles

Published

1 day ago

January 25, 2025

The start of the Palisades and Eaton fires: 24 hours that changed Los Angeles

As the sun rose on Jan. 8, the sky orange from ash and smoke, Angelenos anxiously waited for news about the extent of the damage from the Altadena and Pacific Palisades fires.

It would take days to learn that the conflagrations had caused an unprecedented level of destruction, killing at least 28 people, destroying and damaging more than 18,000 buildings valued at more than $275 billion, and leaving a burn zone 2½ times the size of Manhattan. That for decades to come, the disaster would divide our history into a “before” and “after.”

Here is how those first 24 hours unfolded.

Tuesday, Jan. 7

10:35 am.

The winds were screaming through the Santa Monica Mountains by the time Sue Kohl and her daughter Courtney wrapped up a morning meeting. It was a clear, sunny day in Palisades Village, and the women weren’t too worried about a small fire burning a few miles to the north.

Courtney left the office to walk to Starbucks but returned almost immediately, telling her mother: Get in the car. We’re going now.

From the sidewalk, their clothes and hair whipped by the wind, the women could see flames and smoke — a lot of smoke — coming from the hills. Kohl realized: If the winds turn, this fire could go anywhere.

At home in the Alphabet Streets neighborhood, Kohl put her dogs and photo albums in the car. She left everything else she owned, thinking she’d be back soon.

A large plume of smoke from the Palisades fire rises over the ridge line.

A mother carries her child as they move down a sidewalk away from a line of firetrucks.

11:13 a.m.

Los Angeles sent its first evacuation alert to cell phones in the northern and western Palisades, warning that a fire was burning along Palisades Drive, and those nearby “should get set for a potential evacuation.”

11:23 a.m.

Erin Kyle, her teenage daughter and her daughter’s best friend, who had spent the night at their town house in the Palisades Highlands, were speeding down the mountain, smoke billowing around them.

The sky was turning orange. Palisades Drive was the only way out of the neighborhood. Traffic slowed, then stopped.

As they got closer to Sunset Boulevard, flames burned on both sides of the road. Embers the size of matchbooks smacked into their windshield. To their right, the Calvary Christian School burned.

Some drivers pulled across the tree-lined median onto the northbound lanes of Palisades Drive, driving the wrong way to avoid the traffic jam. Others just abandoned their cars and ran, hauling bags and pet carriers.

“Mom, are we going to have to run?” her daughter asked.

Kyle told the girls that staying in the car was the best course of action. In truth, she wasn’t so sure, as she contemplated a list of several bad options: Leave the car, get hit by flying embers and struggle to carry everything they’d packed. Stay in the car and get burned alive if the fire moved closer.

If we don’t start to move in the next four minutes, she decided, we’ll get out of the car.

Miraculously, cars started to inch forward, but it would take Kyle and the girls more than an hour and a half to move 2.5 miles.

11:52 a.m.

Los Angeles County sent the first evacuation orders to a swath of the Palisades: “LEAVE NOW.”

Around noon

More than 7,500 miles away in Accra, Ghana, where it was around 8 p.m., Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass smiled for photos at a cocktail party at the U.S. Ambassador’s residence. Bass had flown to the West African nation Jan. 4 as part of a Biden Administration delegation to the inauguration of the Ghanaian president.

She’d left Los Angeles City Council President Marqueece Harris-Dawson as the acting mayor. Her staff said she spent most of the cocktail party on the phone dealing with the fire, and shortly after the photos were taken was hustled to a military base to board a flight back to the U.S.

12:45 p.m.

The Los Angeles City Council wrapped its first meeting of the year, which included more than an hour of wrangling over the $1-billion Television City project in the Fairfax district.

At the meeting’s end, Westside Councilmember Traci Park made a brief, urgent announcement: The Palisades fire was threatening homes and lives, she said. Mandatory evacuation orders were going out out soon.

“Pack your bags, be ready to go,” Park said. “This is an emergency.”

12:54 p.m.

In Malibu, the Getty Villa’s emergency preparedness coordinator, Les Borsay, was nervous. The edge of the Villa property was on fire, and embers were whipping through the air like they’d been shot from a gun.

A man strides across burned landscaping toward a structure with numerous archways.

The museum’s prized collection of Greek and Roman antiquities was sealed inside the galleries, the HVAC shut off and the doors taped to keep out smoke and ash. But flames were coming closer to the building that was once the home of oil tycoon J. Paul Getty and now housed labs and offices. The wood-shingled property didn’t have fire sprinklers.

Fortunately, the museum was closed to guests on Tuesdays and the evacuation of non-emergency staff went smoothly. What’s more, Borsay and several operations workers who didn’t normally work at the Villa had been on site that morning to test the fire systems.

In another bit of good luck, a Los Angeles Fire Department helicopter swept by to drop water on the flames, six feet from the edge of the building.

12:59 p.m.

Through an N95 mask, a good Samaritan in the Palisades told a television reporter that he was trying to move cars that were abandoned in the road so firetrucks could get through but that some people had fled holding their car keys.

In a surreal moment, the reporter realized halfway through the interview that he was talking to actor Steve Guttenberg, who said he was trying to move every car he could — except for the Teslas, which he couldn’t figure out how to start.

1:38 p.m.

Evacuation orders expanded to the rest of the Palisades and north into the mountains to Mandeville Canyon Road: “Gather people and pets and leave immediately.”

2:20 p.m.

In the hills of the Palisades, near the Temescal Ridge Trail, Alex Emerick, 34, his younger sister, Rainier, and their parents grabbed garden hoses at their home of 33 years. The family had tried to evacuate when flames were visible from their driveway, but with traffic at a standstill in the neighborhood, they turned around.

They donned goggles and N95 masks and divided up, wetting down their shrubs and quashing small fires erupting in the front, side and back yards. The house across the street went up in flames. Because their bushes and trees bordered another property, putting out the spot fires in their yard may have helped prevent a “chain reaction of embers,” Emerick said, adding: “It’s like we were saving everyone’s properties at once.”

A woman sprays water from a garden hose near a car in a driveway as flames approach.

2:30 p.m.

Fire hoses snaked like spaghetti around the wheels of dozens of abandoned cars on Palisades Drive. Los Angeles County Fire Department bulldozer No. 5 pulled in and started shoving the vehicles aside to clear the road for firetrucks.

3:11 p.m.

In Dallas, at the end of a news conference before a game against the Mavericks, Los Angeles Lakers coach JJ Redick rubbed his eyes, pinched the bridge of his nose and told reporters that his family and his wife’s family had evacuated from the Palisades.

“A lot of people are freaking out right now, including my family,” Redick said. “From the sound of things, with the winds coming tonight, I know a lot of people are scared.”

4 p.m.

At a hastily assembled news conference on Will Rogers State Beach, Los Angeles Fire Department Chief Kristen Crowley told reporters that the fire had grown from 10 acres to 1,261 acres in less than six hours and was threatening more than 13,000 buildings. The winds would “pick up and get worse” between 10 p.m. and 5 a.m., Los Angeles County Fire Chief Anthony Marrone warned.

Gov. Gavin Newsom, in Southern California for a morning event with President Biden that had been canceled, said it “didn’t take more than a text message” for Biden to approve full federal reimbursement for the state’s wildfire response. But, Newsom warned, the night would be worse: “By no stretch of the imagination are we out of the woods.”

Firefighters on a hillside patio monitor an approaching fire.

5 p.m.

As the sun set, the last water drained out of a 1-million gallon tank tucked away in a cul-de-sac north of Palisades Village. That tank, and two others, help maintain water pressure in the highest hills of the Palisades. Gravity draws the water down into faucets, pools and hydrants below, and then the tanks are refilled with water pumped up from the city’s pipelines. Already, the firefight was straining that system.

5:35 p.m.

In Topanga Canyon, Zoe Nisman’s phone was blowing up with repeated notifications telling her to evacuate. She was also seeing a steady stream of messages from friends with news about beloved spots in Malibu — Reel Inn, Cholata Thai — that were gone.

“Everything I grew up with is burning,” Nisman said. “I guess it’s just time to pack.”

5:57 p.m.

As the power began to blink out in various neighborhoods, Angelenos unfolded sleeper sofas and made up guest beds for evacuees, listened to the wind rattling the windows, and wondered if they should pack a go bag.

6:11 p.m.

A man stands at a wrought iron fence in a yard.

Matthew Logelin, 47, was making buttered pasta with parmesan for his daughters, ages 3 and 5, when he heard a loud bang behind his home on Canyon Close Road in Pasadena.

He ran outside to check on two towering pine trees in his back yard. They hadn’t ignited, but then he saw flames — no bigger than a camp fire — burning beneath a Southern California Edison transmission tower on the mountain in Eaton Canyon behind their home.

The fire, first called the “Close fire,” after Logelin’s street, would soon be renamed the Eaton fire. Logelin, the grandson of a state fire marshal, knew what to do: call 911, warn the neighbors, pack the car.

6:26 p.m.

Stretched thin by the Palisades fire and hurricane-force wind gusts, the Los Angeles Fire Department made a rare request to off-duty firefighters: Call in with your availability to work.

The request, the first of its kind in nearly two decades, was an indication of just how serious the fire had become. Complicating matters, a garbled version began to circulate on X and Instagram, where posts claimed the LAFD was “begging anyone with firefighting experience” to call the department’s downtown operations center. The phone line was soon flooded with calls.

7:26 p.m.

Altadena residents east of Lake Avenue were ordered to evacuate. Gusts of up to 100 mph carried burning embers two miles from the blazes. All helicopters were grounded. As Los Angeles headed into a night of unprecedented wind and fire, firefighters could get no help from the air.

7:55 p.m.

In Altadena, Christian Manoukian, 27, was searching desperately for his grandmother outside the Terraces at Park Marino, a nursing home and memory care facility off Lake Avenue.

A staff member had called his uncle 15 minutes earlier, warning: There’s a lot of smoke inside. The facility is in danger. Please come if you can.

Nurses were evacuating the building at a sprint, pushing patients in hospital beds and wheelchairs down two long blocks to the parking lot of a 7-Eleven. The wind snatched at blankets and face masks. Embers whipped through the air. People yelled in Tagalog, English, Spanish and Armenian over the blaring sirens.

“This word is overused, but it was the height of chaos,” Manoukian said.

Manoukian and his uncle found his grandmother and drove her to a nursing home in Highland Park that agreed to take in Altadena residents. Other patients were loaded into ambulances and Pasadena city buses. The nursing home was ablaze less than an hour later.

Two people with face masks prepare to load a patient on a gurney onto a bus.

9:20 p.m.

Every time Steven Seagle, 59, checked the hillside behind his house north of Altadena Drive, the Eaton fire was closer. The flames were chewing through the mountains at more than 100 yards per minute, or more than three miles an hour.

“I’ve never seen anything move that quickly,” Seagle said. “I knew we weren’t coming back.”

His wife and kids and cat had already departed. But Seagle stayed behind to shut off the gas and collect a few more items: his foster son’s glasses, his foster daughter’s photo album, the rings that had belonged to his wife’s late mother. Seagle, a comic book author and artist, also grabbed his portfolio.

But he left behind his favorite painting, by artist Suzanne Jackson. At 4 feet by 6 feet, the frame was too big to fit in the car. (Hours too late, he realized that he could have cut the canvas from the frame.)

Seagle’s last stop was the towering Moreton Bay fig that had shaded the property for decades. You’re the reason we moved here, he told the tree. I hope you can make it. Then he drove away.

10 p.m.

The level-headed experts who usually told John Harabedian that everything would be fine were instead warning of hurricane-force wind and desperate firefights.

Harabedian, the newly elected representative for Altadena and Pasadena in the state Assembly, was in Sacramento for the first week of his first legislative session. In his room at the Sheraton, texts from family, friends and constituents were pouring in. His wife and kids were evacuating. His friends’ homes were burning.

We could lose Sierra Madre, Pasadena, Altadena, La Cañada — everything along the foothills, Harabedian thought. Nothing will ever be the same.

The orange glow of fire lights the night sky along a suburban street at night.

10:25 p.m.

The power was flickering at the Oakridge Mobile Home Park in Sylmar, and Amy Condit was on edge.

The winds were the strongest she’d ever felt, stronger even than 2008, when the Sayer fire destroyed 480 of the park’s 600 homes. She’d made a mental list of what to pack.

A gust of wind landed like a punch. The sky lit up light blue, a moment of daylight in the night.

“I would have sworn it was a nuclear bomb, except the color was wrong,” Condit said.

She looked up the mountain beyond her back yard and saw flames erupt at the base of a power transmission line. Then they started to race toward her.

Condit screamed to her mother to call 911 and hurried to collect a few belongings: documents, pillows, a cuckoo clock. The wind tore her cat, Precious, from her arms.

When an evacuation alert arrived 15 minutes later, Condit was ready. That blaze would soon be called the Hurst fire.

11:11 p.m.

Live images of flames devouring Palisades Village filled the 11 p.m. broadcast on KTTV.. Developer Rick Caruso called in, and in eight minutes, he gave voice to the shock, grief and anger that had engulfed the neighborhood.

The hurricane-force gusts bearing down on Los Angeles hadn’t been a surprise, Caruso said, but the city still hadn’t been prepared. People who lost their homes and businesses were “paying the ultimate price” for L.A.’s mismanagement, he said, including hydrants in the Palisades that were running dry.

“Why isn’t there water in the fire hydrants?” the anchor asked. “That doesn’t make any sense.”

“You’re right — that’s a good question,” Caruso said, and twisted the knife against Bass, who beat him in the 2022 election: “Why don’t you call the mayor, who’s out of the country, and ask her?”

Wednesday, Jan. 8

2:58 a.m.

In Altadena, home health aide Kimberly Barrera, 26, was on the phone with 911, begging for help evacuating a cancer patient from Canyada Avenue. Her patient was weak from radiation treatment, could not stand on his own, and weighed more than 300 pounds.

When Barrera told the dispatcher she would need assistance, the dispatcher sighed, told her to wait, and then hung up. The fire was crawling up the back yard and the house was filled with smoke. Barrera knew they didn’t have time to wait.

Just leave without me, her patient told her. You’re coming with me, or we both stay here, she responded.

Barrera wrapped a gait belt around the man’s waist. On the count of three, she told him, you’ll put your arms around my neck and I’ll lift you by the belt.

“For a moment, I had superhuman strength,” she said.

He slid into the wheelchair and they raced out of the house. The sky was bright red.

3 a.m.

The third and final water tank in the Palisades, a squat steel cylinder in Temescal Canyon, ran dry.

A firefighter pulling a hose is silhouetted by the light of a flaming structure.

3:30 a.m.

Evacuation orders had just gone out to Altadena residents west of Lake Avenue, seven hours later than residents farther east.

Leisa Alexander, her husband and her mother-in-law scrambled into their car on Laurice Avenue, only to find themselves hemmed in on both sides on Marathon Road. In front of them, a tree had fallen into the roadway and caught fire. Behind them, broken power lines whipped in the wind.

Peering through the thick smoke, Alexander’s husband reversed the car under the power lines and drove east. Homes on both sides were on fire. They could feel the heat in the car.

Alexander wondered why an evacuation order hadn’t arrived earlier, and whether people without smartphones would know to leave. Thank goodness she and her husband had been there with her 84-year-old mother-in-law, she thought. If we hadn’t gone up, she wouldn’t be here.

Finally, they spotted an ambulance. Follow it, Alexander told her husband. They fled south.

4:36 a.m.

Phones in Los Angeles buzzed with an alert: FAST MOVING WILDFIRE IN YOUR AREA. AN EVACUATION ORDER HAS BEEN ISSUED FOR THE YOUR AREA. LEAVE NOW.

The alert, sent in error, marked the end of a long and sleepless night for many, as Angelenos waited for the sun to rise.

5:44 a.m.

The United Airlines flight carrying Bass back to Los Angeles pulled away from the gate at Washington Dulles International Airport.

6:18 a.m.

A fourth fire ignited in the Sepulveda Basin, near the intersection of the 405 and 101 freeways. Strong winds whipped the 30-acre blaze, known as the Woodley fire, south toward Burbank Boulevard.

6:30 a.m.

Eric Danneker and his wife Melissa sat in shock in a grocery store parking lot in Pasadena. The couple had fled La Paz Road in Altadena around midnight. A friend had just told them their home had burned.

The adobe-style home, built in 1925, had housed three generations of Melissa’s family. Eric grew up across the street. Everything they owned was with them in their cars: paperwork, clothes, and their dogs, Dreamer and Dribble.

Melissa thought of all the mementos and family heirlooms they had left behind. “The recipes,” she said. Her voice broke.

6:59 a.m.

At sunrise, miles from the fires, many Southern Californians found eerie remnants drifting down onto their yards and balconies: fragments of newspapers, a charred slip of a signed divorce settlement, a faded photograph of a couple holding a newborn.

Hot spots glow red in the remains of a house, a chimney still standing.

7:50 a.m.

In Malibu, smoke mingled with fog along the coast as television news crews began surveying the damage, broadcasting burned-out stretches of the iconic coastline and husks of beloved restaurants like Gladstones, Moonshadows and Reel Inn.

Celebrity hotel heiress Paris Hilton learned from watching KABC-TV that her Malibu home, where her son had taken his first steps, had burned. That moment of loss, she said, is something that “no one should ever have to experience.”

8 a.m.

A media briefing initially planned at Zuma Beach was changed to downtown amid threats of high wind and fire. Ferocious winds had stretched firefighters thin overnight, and the fires, which had already destroyed more than 7,000 acres, were burning with no containment.

Firefighters were prepared “for one or two major brush fires, but not four,” said Los Angeles County Fire Chief Anthony Marrone said.

A man stands next to a scorched tree, a large building behind him.

9 a.m.

More than a dozen employees had spent the night at the Getty Villa, patrolling in pairs to squash small fires with handheld extinguishers. The sound of the fire, crackling and popping, struck Borsay as weirdly familiar, like the YouTube yule log video he put on at Christmas.

The buildings survived the night. Now, it was time for Borsay to check on the collections.

The Villa was showing a special exhibit about Thrace, an ancient region spanning modern Bulgaria and parts of Greece, Turkey and Romania. Thrace’s tribes were wealthy and sophisticated, cited in “The Iliad” as allies of the Trojans who arrived in gilded chariots. Bulgaria loaned more than 150 objects to the exhibit, which took six years to organize, and the fire had become front-page news in the Balkans.

Gusts of wind had left ash rippled in waves across the terrazzo floors outside. Borsay peeled the blue tape off the double doors to the gallery and stepped inside. He couldn’t smell smoke. He couldn’t see dust. The golden antiquities gleamed gently under their spotlights.

The gallery was immaculate.

11:14 a.m.

At a fire station in Santa Monica, LAFD Chief Kristen Crowley told Biden and Newsom that the Palisades fire had grown to 10,802 acres overnight, an increase of more than 1,000%, in less than 24 hours.

11:16 a.m.

United Airlines Flight 667 pulled into a gate at Los Angeles International Airport. Bass exited to the jet bridge, where she was approached by a reporter for a British television network who had been on her flight.

Bass looked away, saying nothing, as the reporter asked whether Bass had a response to fire officials who said they were “stretched to the limit and running out of water.”

The reporter pressed on: “Do you owe citizens an apology for being absent while their homes were burning?” And again: “Have you nothing to say today?” No answer.

Times staff writers Nathan Solis, Andrea Chang, Connor Sheets, Dan Woike, Julia Wick, David Zahniser, Matt Hamilton and Ian James contributed to this report.

Politics

In 2024 Elections, Most Races Were Over Before They Started

Published

6 hours ago

January 26, 2025

Press Room

In 2024 Elections, Most Races Were Over Before They Started

Competition is an endangered species in legislative elections.

A New York Times analysis of the nearly 6,000 congressional and state legislative elections in November shows just how few races were true races. Nearly all either were dominated by an incumbent or played out in a district drawn to favor one party overwhelmingly. The result was a blizzard of blowouts, even in a country that is narrowly divided on politics.

Just 8 percent of congressional races (36 of 435) and 7 percent of state legislative races (400 of 5,465) were decided by fewer than five percentage points, according to The Times’s analysis.

Consequences from the death of competition are readily apparent. Roughly 90 percent of races are now decided not by general-election voters in November but by the partisans who tend to vote in primaries months earlier. That favors candidates who appeal to ideological voters and lawmakers who are less likely to compromise. It exacerbates the polarization that has led to deadlock in Congress and in statehouses.

“Because of partisan and racial gerrymandering, you end up with these skewed results and legislative bodies that don’t necessarily reflect the political makeup of either the states or, writ large, the House of Representatives representing the political desires of the American people,” said Eric H. Holder Jr., the attorney general in the Obama administration who, as chair of the National Democratic Redistricting Committee, has criticized the mapmaking process and at times even called out his own party’s redistricting practices.

In 2020, the last time that once-a-decade national exercise took place, both parties largely followed a similar strategy. Their maps typically made districts safer by stocking them with voters from one party, rather than breaking them up in an effort to pick up seats. Republicans, as the party in control of the process in more states, drew more of these slanted districts than Democrats.

Other factors have contributed to vanishing competition, including demographic shifts and “political sorting” — the tendency of like-minded citizens to live in the same community. But the role of redistricting is evident when zooming in on a single state.

Take, for example, Texas, where in 2020, before redistricting, 10 of 38 congressional races were decided by 10 percentage points or fewer. In 2024, just two races were. In five races last year, Democrats did not even run a candidate, ceding the seat to Republicans. One Democrat ran unopposed.

In state legislatures, where lawmakers are drawing maps for their own districts, safe seats abound.

There are 181 state legislative seats in Texas, with 31 senators and 150 representatives. In 2024, just four of those elections — three in the Statehouse and one in the State Senate — were decided by five points or fewer, according to The Times’s analysis.

“Legislatures draw maps in most places, and the reality is, a big concern for members who have to pass these bills is: ‘What happens to my district?’” said Michael Li, a senior counsel for the Democracy Program at the Brennan Center for Justice. “Very few members are willing to say, ‘Oh, gosh, I should have a more competitive district.’ So there is an inherent conflict of interest in the way that we draw districts.”

Adam Kincaid, the director of the National Republican Redistricting Trust, said that making seats safer was always the goal.

“We made no bones about the fact that we’re going to shore up incumbents, and where we had opportunities to go on offense, we were going to do that,” Mr. Kincaid said. “So what that means is bringing a whole lot of Republican seats that were otherwise in jeopardy off the board.”

The Power of a Map

While it is easy to focus on the candidates, the money, the message or the economy, increasingly it is the maps that determine the outcome. In North Carolina, they may have decided control of the U.S. House of Representatives.

Only one of the state’s 14 congressional districts was decided by fewer than five points. A Republican won the state’s next closest race — by 14 points.

In 2022, the State Supreme Court ordered a more competitive map, but it was tossed out after midterm elections shook up the balance of the court. The replacement, which was drawn by the Republican-led Legislature, gave three Democratic seats to the G.O.P. while making nearly every district safer for the party that held it.

It is impossible to know how elections held under the first map would have turned out. But, according to Justin Levitt, a redistricting law expert at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles, “had every seat stayed the same as in 2022, those three seats would have made the difference, and Democrats would have had a one-seat majority” in Congress.

Of course, North Carolina played a pivotal role because the margin in the House was so small. Gerrymanders nudge the political balance in every election, but the 2024 vote was the rare occasion in which they were decisive.

North Carolina’s role in the 2024 House elections follows a historic U.S. Supreme Court ruling in 2019 — involving partisan congressional maps in North Carolina — in which the court called partisan gerrymanders a political problem outside federal courts’ jurisdiction.

Even though those maps were “blatant examples of partisanship driving districting decisions,” the majority wrote, “state statutes and state constitutions can provide standards and guidance for state courts to apply.”

Almost unnoticed, other battles over slanted congressional maps that could affect the 2026 elections are crawling though state and federal courts — in Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, North Carolina (again), South Carolina, Texas and Utah.

Of all those lawsuits, the one most likely to affect the next House elections appears to be in Utah, where Salt Lake City, the state’s liberal hub, was carved into four districts to water down the impact of Democratic voters on House races.

Democrats appear likely to pick up a single House seat from that litigation, which faces a crucial court hearing on Friday.

Nationwide Decline

North Carolina is hardly an outlier.

In Illinois, a state dominated by Democrats, no congressional election was within a five-point margin, and just two were within 10 points. In Maryland, just one district was within a five-point margin.

Georgia did not have a single congressional district within a 10-point margin, out of 14 seats. The state’s closest race was the 13-point victory by Representative Sanford Bishop, a Democrat, in the Second Congressional District.

At the state legislative level, the numbers were even starker.

In Georgia, just five of the 236 state legislative seats, or 2 percent, were decided by five points or fewer, and more than half of the races were uncontested. In Florida, 10 of the 160 state legislative races were within a five-point margin.

With so few general elections to worry about, tribalism can take over in legislatures, leaving many elected officials to worry only about primary challenges, often from their party’s fringes. In the modern climate of political polarization, the lack of competitive districts not only removes an incentive to work with the other party but actively deters doing so.

“As competitive districts dwindle, so do incentives to compromise,” said Steve Israel, a former Democratic congressman from New York and the former chair of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. “I remember campaigning on bipartisanship in a very moderate district in my first election in 2000. By the time I left in 2017, talking about crossing the aisle was like announcing a walk to my own firing squad.”

Politics

Inside the Oval Office: What Biden décor did Trump ditch?

Published

6 hours ago

January 26, 2025

Press Room

Inside the Oval Office: What Biden décor did Trump ditch?

When a new president moves into the White House, they have free rein to redecorate as they see fit.

As President Donald Trump participated in inaugural ceremonies on Monday, dozens of staffers worked furiously at the White House to move former President Biden’s personal items out and Trump’s in.

Some of the decor seen in the Oval Office belongs to the president – such as the family photos both Biden and Trump displayed behind the Resolute Desk. But other items, like portraits of former presidents, the tables, chairs and curios belong to the White House Collection and are selected by the president to be featured during their term.

The look of the Oval Office, from the carpet to curtains and artwork on the walls, is entirely the president’s choice. Here’s a look at what Trump has kept and what he’s ditched from his predecessor:

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Kept: The Resolute Desk

Executive Orders regarding trade lay on the Resolute desk in the Oval Office of the White House on March 31, 2017, in Washington, D.C. (Olivier Douliery-Pool/Getty Images)

All but three U.S. presidents since 1880 – LBJ, Nixon and Ford – have used the famous desk that was gifted to President Rutherford B. Hayes by Queen Victoria that year. Trump used it in his first term, as did Biden, and Trump was pictured signing a flurry of executive actions at the desk on his first day in office on Monday.

Removed: President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s portrait

Biden sits with mask on in the Oval Office

President Joe Biden sits underneath a portrait of former President Franklin D. Roosevelt while meeting with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in the Oval Office at the White House on Sept. 1, 2021, in Washington, D.C. This was the two leaders’ first face-to-face meeting and the first by a Ukrainian leader in more than four years. (Doug Mills-Pool/Getty Images)

When Biden assumed office, he hung a large portrait of progressive hero FDR over the fireplace, which became the focus of the room. Biden’s intent was to honor Roosevelt, who guided the nation through the Great Depression and World War II, as the U.S. faced another crisis during the COVID-19 pandemic.

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Trump has removed the portrait and replaced it with one of President George Washington, which hung in the Oval Office during Trump’s first term, The Wall Street Journal reported.

Kept: Bust of Martin Luther King Jr.

A bust of Martin Luther King Jr. is featured in the Oval Office

A sculpted bust of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., adorns a table for an early preview of the redesigned Oval Office awaiting President Joseph Biden at the White House in Washington, DC. (Bill O’Leary/The Washington Post via Getty Images)

A bust of civil rights hero Martin Luther King Jr. displayed by both Trump and Biden will remain in the Oval Office for Trump’s second term, according to the Journal.

Swapped: Family photos

President Trump sits at the Resolute Desk with family photos behind him.

President Donald Trump after signing executive orders in the Oval Office of the White House in Washington, D.C., on Thurs., Jan. 23, 2025. (Yuri Gripas/Abaca/Bloomberg via Getty Images)

A collection of Trump family photos now sits on a small table behind the Resolute desk. Among them is a picture of the president’s mother, Mary Anne MacLeod Trump, and a portrait of his father, Fred Trump. Also displayed are a photo of Trump’s eldest three children in formal evening wear; a photo of Trump with his daughter Ivanka when she was a girl; and a photo of Trump with first lady Melania Trump when their son Barron was a baby.

WHY TRUMP’S HOLDING WEEKEND RALLY IN LAS VEGAS LESS THAN A WEEK INTO NEW ADMIN

Biden family photos were previously arranged on this table, including one of his adult children, Beau, Hunter and Ashley Biden.

Kept: Benjamin Franklin portrait

Trump aides Natalie Harp and Stephen Cheung listen as President Trump signs executive orders in the White House.

Natalie Harp, an aide to U.S. President Donald Trump, and White House Communications Director Steven Cheung (R) listen as President Trump signs a series of executive orders in the Oval Office of the White House on Jan. 23, 2025, in Washington, D.C. A portrait of Benjamin Franklin hangs on the wall in the background. (Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images)

A portrait of Benjamin Franklin that Biden added to the Oval Office to signify his focus on science will remain there during Trump’s term, the Wall Street Journal reported.

Removed: Robert F. Kennedy bust

A bust of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. sits behind President Biden in the White House

Robert F. Kennedy Bust behind President Joe Biden during a meeting with Prime Minister of the Czech Republic Petr Fiala in the Oval Office of the White House on Monday April 15, 2024 (Demetrius Freeman/The Washington Post via Getty Images)

Trump has swapped out a bust of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. that Biden placed near the fireplace in favor of a sculpture of President Andrew Jackson called, “The Bronco Buster,” by Frederic Remington. The Jackson sculpture also featured in the Oval Office during Trump’s first term, according to the Journal.

Returned: Winston Churchill bust

British Prime Minister Theresa May and President Donald Trump pose by Winston Churchill bust in Oval Office

British Prime Minister Theresa May (L) and President Donald Trump meet beside a bust of former British Prime Minister Winston Churchill in the Oval Office of the White House on Jan. 27, 2017 in Washington, D.C. (BRENDAN SMIALOWSKI/AFP via Getty Images)

A bust of Winston Churchill that Biden had removed is back at Trump’s direction. The bronze bust by British American artist Jacob Epstein has been the focus of past controversy. Then-London Mayor Boris Johnson had claimed that President Obama removed the bust upon taking office in 2009 – but the White House refuted that claim in 2012, observing that the bust had been placed just outside the Oval Office in the White House’s Treaty Room.

Returned: Andrew Jackson portrait

President Donald Trump speaks from the Resolute Desk with a portrait of Andrew Jackson in the background

President Donald Trump speaks to the media after signing executive orders in the Oval Office of the White House in Washington, D.C, on Jan. 23, 2025. (ROBERTO SCHMIDT/AFP via Getty Images)

A new painting of President Andrew Jackson provided by the White House art collection features prominently in Trump’s Oval Office, according to WSJ. Trump has long admired the nation’s seventh president, a populist and disruptive figure whose election Trump once said “shook the establishment like an earthquake” – not unlike his own victories.

Returned: U.S. military flags

President Trump signs executive orders while taking questions from the press.

President Donald Trump signs an executive order in the Oval Office of the White House in Washington, D.C., US, on Monday, Jan. 20, 2025. Flags representing different branches of the U.S. military are seen in the background. (Jim Lo Scalzo/EPA/Bloomberg via Getty Images)

Trump is one again prominently featuring flags representing each branch of the armed services in the Oval Office.

Chris Pandolfo is a breaking news reporter for Fox News Digital. Send tips to chris.pandolfo@fox.com and follow him on Twitter @ChrisCPandolfo.

Politics

Trump talks 'free speech' while moving to muzzle those he disagrees with

Published

7 hours ago

January 26, 2025

Press Room

Trump talks 'free speech' while moving to muzzle those he disagrees with

In one of his first acts in office, President Trump issued an executive order promising to end government censorship and restore free speech.

The order accused the outgoing Biden administration of harassing social media companies and violating the rights of average Americans “under the guise” of combating disinformation online, and said federal resources would no longer be used to “unconstitutionally abridge the free speech of any American citizen.”

The order echoed a recurring theme from Trump’s campaign — that liberals across the federal government are censoring conservative voices to advance their own “woke” agenda — and immediately resonated with his followers.

“This order is a critical step to ensure the government cannot dictate what speech is permissible or weaponize private entities to enforce censorship,” said Mark Trammell of the Center for American Liberty, a conservative rights group founded by California attorney Harmeet K. Dhillon, Trump’s nominee to lead the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division.

However, many others said they found Trump’s order absurd — both because of his long track record of attacking speech he doesn’t like, and because of his new administration’s simultaneous efforts to muzzle people it disagrees with, including journalists, federal health officials, teachers, diplomats, climate scientists and the LGBTQ+ community.

“Let’s not be naive,” said Hadar Harris, the Washington managing director of PEN America, which has advocated for free speech in the U.S. for more than a century. “While some of President Trump’s flurry of executive orders pay lip service to free speech, in reality they frame a frontal assault against it, dictating the terms of allowable expression and identities, demanding political loyalty from civil servants, and threatening retaliation against dissent in ways that could cast a broad chill on free expression well beyond the halls of government.”

California Atty. Gen. Rob Bonta said Trump’s claiming to be a free speech champion while attacking the media and harshly restricting how longtime civil servants can communicate with the public — including in critical areas such as public health — was “ironic and hypocritical.”

“It’s classic Trump administration,” Bonta said. “It’s their rhetoric versus their actions, and you have to look at their actions.”

Limiting communication

Both at home and abroad, the Trump administration has ordered federal employees and diplomats to cease communications on a range of issues, including “diversity, equity and inclusion,” “environmental justice” and “gender ideology.”

It ordered Department of Defense officials to stop posting information on official social media accounts unless it is about the southern border, and health and other federal experts to limit communications even on critical public safety issues such as the spread of bird flu — which California officials have declared an emergency.

Dr. Jeffrey Klausner, a public health professor and infectious-disease expert at USC, said he was alarmed Thursday when the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention withdrew from a planned bird flu discussion with the Infectious Disease Society of America. Klausner said their pulling out was “a big loss for our ability to understand what’s going on” nationally.

Klausner said past administrations have given health leaders new orders — to curtail spending, shift priorities — but never such directives to halt so many critical communications at once. He called it “extremely concerning.”

Trump also has ordered a sweeping crackdown on federal communications about the LGBTQ+ community — removing LGBTQ+ resource materials from government websites and placing new restrictions on how federal employees can discuss or speak to LGBTQ+ people — or even use words such as “sex” or “gender.”

He has threatened similar restrictions on public school teachers and administrators, and ordered that LGBTQ+ Americans may no longer identify as transgender on passports and other documents.

Jenny Pizer, chief legal officer for the LGBTQ+ legal advocacy group Lambda Legal, said Trump’s orders are “the antithesis of free speech” and a clear government attempt to “silence people, to chill speech” — which is illegal.

She pointed to new rules barring federal employees, contractors and materials from referencing gender identity or fluidity. “Those concepts are being censored, and the language with which one articulates the concepts is being censored,” she said.

Lambda Legal has fought such efforts before. When Trump in 2020 issued an executive order barring federal grantees conducting workplace diversity training from referencing topics such as implicit bias or critical race theory — calling them “divisive concepts” — Lambda Legal and others sued and won an injunction blocking the order.

Trump has also kept up his criticism of the news media, calling journalists the “enemy of the people.” He is suing various media organizations — including the board of the Pulitzer Prizes and the Des Moines Register and its parent company, Gannett — over journalism he claims was libelous or unfair. The outlets have defended their work.

Katherine Jacobsen, U.S. program coordinator at the Committee to Protect Journalists, said journalists would welcome an honest effort to bolster free speech protections across the political spectrum, but Trump’s order isn’t that.

“What we’ve seen in this post-election period — and even before the election kicked off, in his last presidency — is that he hasn’t really been willing to support free speech when it counters his narrative,” Jacobsen said.

Online debate

At the core of Trump’s censorship order is his claim that the Biden administration “trampled free speech rights by censoring Americans’ speech,” including by “exerting substantial coercive pressure” on online platforms.

It is not a new argument.

After the Jan. 6, 2021, attack and multiple investigations into efforts by foreign adversaries to spread disinformation and sow distrust in the American political system, social media companies promised to crack down — including by suspending thousands of accounts. Under the Biden administration, officials kept up pressure on those platforms to take down posts the administration deemed false and dangerous, including about U.S. election integrity but also the COVID-19 pandemic.

Those efforts increasingly rankled Republicans and eventually Republican states sued, accusing the Biden administration of illegally coercing the platforms to erase conservative content.

Experts say claims of liberal bias on social platforms are generally overblown, and point to thriving conservative communities online as proof. However, surveys have shown that many conservatives believe that bias exists. And Meta’s chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg, recently lent credence to the claims by complaining publicly and to Congress about pressure his company received from the Biden administration to remove or limit the spread of certain content, including satirical content about COVID-19.

Lawyers for the Biden administration have said there is a difference between legitimate persuasion and inappropriate coercion, and that communication channels between government and social media companies had to remain open for public safety reasons. The Supreme Court ruled in favor of the Biden administration in June, finding the states had no standing to sue. Litigation around the issue persists.

In the meantime, tech leaders were shifting away from moderation — and toward Trump.

Elon Musk, the richest man in the world, purchased the social media platform X — then Twitter — in October 2022 on a promise to make it more free. He has described himself as a “free speech absolutist” and said Twitter wasn’t living up to its potential as a “platform for free speech” — which he said he would fix by loosening content restrictions.

Since then, Musk has joined Trump’s inner circle, spent more than a quarter of a billion dollars to help reelect Trump and Republicans in Congress, and been appointed by Trump to lead a new agency called the “Department of Government Efficiency,” raising all sorts of questions about conflicts given contracts Musk — also chief executive of SpaceX and Tesla — holds with the federal government.

Critics have also questioned Musk’s commitment to free speech. He has kicked journalists covering him off X and amplified conservative talking points on the platform. In September, X disclosed it had suspended nearly 5.3 million accounts in the first half of last year, compared with 1.6 million accounts it suspended in the first half of 2022.

Earlier this month, Zuckerberg of Meta — which owns Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp — announced his company had allowed for “too much censorship” and would be getting rid of fact-checkers, reducing content restrictions and serving up more political content.

Zuckerberg then went on the popular Joe Rogan podcast, where he said corporate America had been “neutered” and “emasculated” and complained bitterly about Biden administration officials calling Meta team members to demand they take down certain content — while “threatening repercussions if we don’t.”

A host of other tech leaders in addition to Musk and Zuckerberg — Amazon founder Jeff Bezos and the chief executives of Apple, Google and TikTok — were on hand for Trump’s inauguration. Many also donated to the events.

Trammell, of the Center for American Liberty, said the Biden administration violated the rights of average Americans with such actions, and that Trump’s order “reaffirms America’s commitment to free expression.” Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), who as chair of the House Judiciary Committee has overseen investigations into social media bias, noted the anti-censorship order, among others, in a post on X, writing, “Common sense is back!”

Harris, of PEN America, said her organization agrees that “government censorship of speech is intolerable in a free society,” as Trump’s order states, and that the government must “take care” in how it addresses things like disinformation on social media platforms “so as not to infringe on free speech.”

However, the government “should be able to communicate and engage in information sharing with tech companies when disinformation is swirling online during a natural disaster, pandemic, foreign interference in an election, or other moment of heightened tension and risks to the public,” Harris said.

While purporting to defend speech already protected by the 1st Amendment, Trump’s order would make such necessary communication “impossible” and “limit the government’s ability to address disinformation at all,” Harris said — “giving disinformation free reign.”

Speaking out

Kate Oakley, senior director of legal policy at the pro-LGBTQ+ Human Rights Campaign, said while there are some legitimate restrictions on free speech — you can’t scream ‘fire!” in a crowded theater, for example — the Constitution already protects American citizens from the sort of government censorship that Trump purports to target with his order.

It also protects them from some of the things Trump’s other orders would usher in if implemented, she said.

“What he wants to do is make sure that speech or beliefs that are critical of him have less opportunity to be expressed, that speech or beliefs that are praising him have more ability to be out there, and to the extent that people are saying, doing, believing, reading things that he doesn’t approve of, he would like to shut that down and is taking actions to do so,” Oakley said.

But “our government does not get to tell us those things,” Oakley said, and groups such as hers are going to be using their voice to argue that point vociferously — including, if necessary, in court.

Bonta, California’s attorney general, said Trump is a “seasoned salesman” when it comes to saying one thing and doing another, but California will not be fooled and will also be calling out Trump’s anti-free speech actions and those that threaten public safety.

Pizer, of Lambda Legal, said legal intervention from groups like hers may not come immediately, as some of the orders are “still amorphous or theoretical enough that we can’t see what the effect will be.” But they are watching closely, she said, and already see the pain.

“The reality,” she said, “is that lovely, wonderful people who never did anything to hurt anybody are going to be suffering along the way as we try to shut this stuff down as fast as we can.”

Times staff writer Tracy Wilkinson in Washington contributed to this report.