Apocalyptic fires had been ravaging Los Angeles for more than 24 hours when Mayor Karen Bass stepped off a plane and into a now-viral encounter that may come to define her mayoralty.

As an Irish reporter who happened to be on her flight hurled questions at her, the mayor of the nation’s second-largest metropolis stood silent and seemingly paralyzed.

“Do you owe citizens an apology for being absent while their homes were burning?” No answer.

“Do you regret cutting the fire department budget by millions of dollars, Madame Mayor?” No answer.

“Have you nothing to say today?”

Bass stared forward, then down at her feet, before pushing her way down the sky bridge and out toward her smoldering city.

She had left Los Angeles on Jan. 4, as the National Weather Service intensified warnings about a coming windstorm, to attend the inauguration of Ghanaian President John Dramani Mahama. She remained out of the country as the Palisades fire ignited, then exploded, with other fires soon erupting in and around the city.

She returned Wednesday to public outrage about her whereabouts and questions about empty hydrants, an empty reservoir and, according to some, insufficient resources at the Fire Department. Her handling of questions in the days that followed has only intensified some of that criticism.

Bass has also battled extraordinary dissension in her own ranks, with Los Angeles Fire Chief Kristin Crowley in interviews Friday characterizing the department as understaffed and underfunded and implying that Bass had failed her. False rumors that night that Bass had fired Crowley added to the chaos and sense that Bass was not entirely in control.

Now — while Bass navigates a calamity that will redefine the city — her political future also hangs in the balance.

In a moment of anguish where people desperately want heroes and villains to make sense of their own pain, Bass has undoubtedly become a punching bag for portions of the city.

Her absence, combined with an unsteady early performance and the unprecedented attack from her fire chief, have only intensified her vulnerabilities. And on X, she has become a much-maligned conservative meme.

But only time will reveal the severity of the political fallout. There will be investigations into whether fire and water officials failed and whether City Hall missed opportunities to make communities more fire resilient. Such answers will take months, if not years, to sort out.

In a belligerent California landscape only provisionally tamed by human hands, fire is an inevitability. Many of the seeds for destruction were sown long before Bass took office — rising temperatures that left hillsides dry and poised to explode with intense winds, planning decisions from generations ago that placed homes inside vulnerable, brush-covered canyons.

Even before last week’s unprecedented firestorms, climate change was reshaping California in terrifying ways, with fire leveling entire communities in places like Santa Rosa and Paradise.

And the hard work of rebuilding is just beginning.

“For all Angelenos, we are hurting, grieving, still in shock and angry. And I am too,” Bass said during a briefing Saturday morning. “The devastation our city has faced. But in spite of the grief, in spite of the anger, in spite of the shock, we have got to stay focused until this time passes, until the fires are out.”

Bass, who declined to be interviewed, pledged a “a full accounting of what worked and especially what did not” once the flames have receded.

Elected in November 2022, the first-term mayor has spent her initial years in office focused on the city’s sprawling and complex homelessness emergency. She has made some incremental progress on homelessness, but had also faced few external crises until last week.

Before the fires, even as Angelenos expressed frustration with the direction of the city, residents still largely approved of her job performance.

But that goodwill is dissipating.

In recent days, the hits have come from all sides, with her 2022 challenger, billionaire mall mogul Rick Caruso, castigating Bass in the media for her absence and handling of the fire.

Caruso, whose Palisades mall survived the conflagration with the help of private firefighters, told The Times last week that Bass’ “terrible” leadership had resulted in “billions of dollars in damage because she wasn’t here and didn’t know what she was doing.”

A Change.org petition demanding her resignation has received more than 120,000 signatures.

Bass, 71, has also been blasted over cutbacks in Fire Department operations, with those attacks coming from both the right and the left. Kenneth Mejia, the city controller and progressive darling, has been particularly critical on social media.

Bass and the city’s budget analysts have pushed back on that budget cut narrative, pointing out the department was projected to grow significantly this year — well before the fires broke out, thanks in large part to a package of firefighter raises.

On Monday morning, Dr. Patrick Soon-Shiong, the owner of The Times, said it was “a mistake” for the paper to have endorsed Bass in 2022 in an interview on “The Morning Meeting,” a YouTube-based politics show. (Endorsements are made by The Times’ editorial board, which operates separately from the newsroom.)

Critics have also harped on Bass’ lack of visibility outside of official briefings, saying the former six-term congresswoman has appeared more like a legislator than a chief executive during a moment when residents desperately want to feel reassurance from their leader.

Gov. Gavin Newsom, several members of the county Board of Supervisors and City Councilmember Traci Park, who represents Pacific Palisades, have been more visibly present than the mayor in affected communities and on local news.

But the real crucible for the mayor is only just beginning to take shape, with her political prospects inextricably tied to the almost unfathomably knotty recovery ahead.

In a place long circumscribed by disaster, Bass is facing a catastrophe with financial and logistical burdens that will likely dwarf the combined fallout from the 1994 Northridge earthquake and the 1992 civil unrest. She will also be responsible for a mammoth environmental cleanup effort and the challenge of housing thousands of newly homeless Angelenos in an already supercharged housing market. All of this will have to happen as she prepares for the massive footprint and operational challenges of the coming 2028 Olympics.

Before swaths of the city immolated, the Democratic mayor of an overwhelmingly Democratic city was widely expected to sail into a second term with no serious opponents in the 2026 election.

Potential challengers may now “smell blood in the water,” as one local political consultant put it, and reassess the viability of mounting their own campaigns amid a rapidly shifting political landscape.

A representative for Caruso, a Republican-turned-Democrat who spent more than $100 million of his personal fortune on his 2022 campaign, did not respond when asked if he planned to run again. Jane Nguyen, a spokesperson for Mejia, said the city controller was “focused on the job right now” and had not made any decisions about future races.

“I don’t think this is a fatal situation yet for her reelection chances,” said Ange-Marie Hancock, a former USC political science and international relations department chair, who now leads Ohio State University’s Kirwan Institute for the Study of Race and Ethnicity.

There is still time for the former South L.A. community organizer to pivot back to the political brand she is known for, defined by “a deep sense of care for the community,” Hancock said.

But it won’t be easy.

Even some political allies have looked askance at the mayor’s handling of the snowballing critiques last week, with several expressing disbelief at the viral airport interview and her tone on followup questions in the days following.

The mayor, who has long brushed off questions she casts as politically motivated with an air of annoyance, was combative and defensive in news conferences when pressed about her trip. It took days for her to publicly acknowledge the level of raw fury being expressed about the city’s fire response.

Only a portion of the lethal conflagrations are within city boundaries, though Bass has also battled blame for the response to the Eaton fire, which is well outside her purview.

Others have condemned Bass’ critics as political vultures who are only hurting the city in an already perilous moment.

“It is not warranted,” Steve Soboroff, a former president of the Los Angeles Police Commission and longtime supporter of the mayor, said of the criticism. “It’s just convenient and easy for people who want to spend their time pointing fingers instead of looking forward. This was an act of God. This was a force majeure. This was beyond anybody’s control.”

Bass obviously does not control the wind, nor can she see the future. And an obliteration of this magnitude required a perfect storm of factors that few would have predicted several days ahead of time.

Still, before Bass left town, the regional branch of the National Weather Service was predicting critical fire conditions, verbiage that shifted to “extreme fire weather conditions” on Jan. 5. By late last Monday morning, they had issued an urgent warning for a “life-threatening & destructive windstorm,” raising nagging questions about the mayor’s priorities and why she did not leave Ghana sooner.

“I don’t understand how they did not cancel her trip,” a senior staffer for another local elected official said, explaining that their office had begun viewing the coming wind event as a grave threat during the preceding weekend. “It was political malpractice.”

The staffer, who was not authorized to speak publicly, said it was common practice for Los Angeles politicians to cancel, or prepare to cancel, prearranged events during severe weather events.

Still, Bass is not the first California political leader to lead in absentia during a moment of exigent crisis.

Former Mayor James Hahn was on a lobbying trip to Washington, D.C. on Sept. 11, 2001, and unable to return to the city for several days with air travel suspended. When the Watts riots erupted in 1965, then-Gov. Pat Brown was famously vacationing in Greece; his absence helped cement his ouster by challenger Ronald Reagan the next year.

In a city of more than 4 million people, TMZ happened to find two prominent Bass supporters — actors Kym Whitley and Yvette Nicole Brown — exiting a San Fernando Valley grocery store on Saturday. They fervently defended Bass in a seemingly impromptu interview.

They implied that Bass was being held to a higher standard as a Black woman and unfairly blamed for a natural disaster.

“When smear campaigns begin against her with a political motive, she’s not the kind to fly her own flag,” Brown said Sunday of the mayor, who typically eschews public political fights. “And more importantly, this is not the time for anyone to be trying to position themselves for the next election.”

The mayor’s quiet style and penchant for soft power, which some have found lacking in this moment of roaring catastrophe, could also be a strength in the months to come.

Bass’ dexterity as a coalition builder and the deep federal relationships that she used as a selling point during her campaign make her particularly well poised to succeed in leading the city’s recovery, Soboroff said.

As other state and local leaders took showboating shots at President-elect Donald Trump, Bass publicly sought to defuse the friction, saying she had been in conversation with representatives of the incoming administration and was not worried about any alleged lack of communication.

“During disasters, we look for someone to blame. But it’s also that our politics have become polarized and nationalized, so this gets used as an excuse to bash on California for a variety of reasons,” said Manuel Pastor, director of the USC Equity Research Institute.

Pastor, who served on Bass’ transition team, cited the echo chamber of disinformation on X and right-wing political actors seizing on the crisis for their own ends.

“She will be judged on the rebuilding, and she will be judged on whether or not the city can get itself in shape for the Olympics,” Pastor said.

Times staff writer David Zahniser contributed to this report.