- Gov. Newsom has expressed concern that Trump would withhold disaster aid.
- “He’s tried to do it in the past,” Newsom said during a recent taping of “Pod Save America.”
- Los Angeles is fighting multiple devastating wildfires.
Gov. Gavin Newsom of California said President-elect Donald Trump may seek to withhold federal disaster aid to California as multiple wildfires rage in and around Los Angeles.
“He’s been pretty straightforward about that,” Newsom said on the “Pod Save America” podcast, which was posted Saturday morning. “He’s tried to do it in the past. He’s not just done it here in California.”
“He’s done it in states all across the country,” Newsom continued. “In 2018, even before I was governor of California, he tried to withhold money down in Orange County until apparently a staff member —and this has been well reported — said there were a lot of Trump supporters. And, then, he decided to change his mind.”
Former Trump White House official Mark Harvey told Politico last year that Trump initially declined to authorize disaster aid for California because it leans Democrat but reversed his position after learning that the affected area was in Orange County, which for generations had been a GOP stronghold.
“We went as far as looking up how many votes he got in those impacted areas … to show him these are people who voted for you,” Harvey told the outlet ahead of the November 2024 election.
JPMorgan analysts said the blazes tearing through the Los Angeles region could lead to over $20 billion in insured losses — and about $50 billion in total economic losses. That would make these conflagrations “significantly more severe” than the Camp Fires that struck the state in 2018 and racked up $10 billion in insured losses, the current record.
During the podcast on Saturday, Newsom also called out Trump for spreading what he called “indelible misinformation.” Trump has blamed the governor’s water policies for the devastating fires.
“What the president-elect was saying about State Water Project and the Delta smelt somehow being culpable of somehow leading to some of the challenges that we face down here…it’s delusional,” he said.
Emergency workers fighting the LA fires have reported fire hydrants running dry after unprecedented demand on the water system. Newsom on Friday ordered a probe into the source of the water supply issues.
“I am calling for an independent investigation into the loss of water pressure to local fire hydrants and the reported unavailability of water supplies from the Santa Ynez Reservoir,” he wrote in a post on X. “We need answers to ensure this does not happen again and we have every resource available to fight these catastrophic fires.”
More than 150,000 residents have been ordered to evacuate their homes and over 38,000 acres have so far burned in the fires. The death toll has risen to 11 as of Saturday, according to the Los Angeles County Medical Examiner.
President Joe Biden on Thursday announced that the federal government would cover 100% of the cost of disaster aid for 180 days.
Trump, meanwhile, has been relentless in his criticism of both Newsom and Biden.
“The fires in Los Angeles may go down, in dollar amount, as the worst in the History of our Country,” he said in a Truth Social post on Wednesday. “Let this serve, and be emblematic, of the gross incompetence and mismanagement of the Biden/Newscum Duo.”
In a statement to Business Insider, Trump spokesperson Steven Cheung said Newsom “should be doing his fucking job and actually help people who continue to suffer under his terrible leadership.”
