Washington (AFP) – Incoming US president Donald Trump sparked a political battle with outgoing leader Joe Biden and California’s Democratic governor Thursday over the wildfires ravaging Los Angeles. Trump launched a series of evidence-free broadsides accusing Governor Gavin Newsom of a variety of failings — including wasting water that could have been used to fight fires in order to protect a kind of fish. “Gavin Newscum should resign. This is all his fault!!!” Trump said on his Truth Social network, using his usual nickname for the Democrat, who is widely viewed as a potential White House contender. Trump added that the deadly Los Angeles fires showed that January 20, when he replaces Biden in the White House, “cannot come fast enough.” “Let this serve, and be emblematic, of the gross incompetence and mismanagement of the Biden/Newscum Duo,” he said.
Biden hit back on Thursday, saying people should “not make a political deal of it” as he held a crisis meeting of administration officials at the White House. He had been due to leave for Italy to see Pope Francis on the final foreign trip of his presidency on Thursday, but canceled it late Wednesday to stay and deal with the fires. “I’m leaving this office very shortly, but it’s not about the politics,” he said. “It’s about giving people some sense of security that we’re going to be able to get this under control.” Biden unveiled a series of announcements about fresh federal funding and resources to help California deal with what he called the most devastating wildfires in the state’s history. But he appeared especially keen to debunk the claims that Democratic mismanagement had caused water shortages which left firefighters struggling to put out the inferno.
Notably, Trump had accused Newsom of blocking the flow of snow melt to “protect an essentially worthless fish called a smelt, by giving it less water (it didn’t work!)” Biden insisted that the problem lay with power outages — after utility companies cut electricity amid fears that faulty power lines could spark more fires — that took water pumps offline. And he urged officials at the White House meeting to spread the word. “In crisis, rumors and fear spread very quickly,” he said. “It allows for a lot of uninformed people to make…accusations about the local officials not caring.” Biden also said the Los Angeles fires showed that “climate change is real” — with Trump threatening to pull back on US efforts to combat global warming when he returns to the White House.
In one of his earlier Truth Social posts, Trump had accused Biden of diverting money to “Green New Scam” climate policies instead of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA). Biden has repeatedly denied steering funds away from FEMA, including after hurricanes lashed the United States in October, when Trump said he was sending the money to migrants instead. Governor Newsom rejected Trump’s claims in a CNN interview on Wednesday, saying: “People are literally fleeing… This guy wanted to politicize it.”
Conspiracy theories have spread almost as fast as the fires themselves, with social media full of unproven claims about firefighting gear being sent to Ukraine and a lack of firefighting staff due to diversity issues. The world’s richest man, Elon Musk, a key Trump ally, took to his social network X to promote a number of those conspiracy theories.
© 2024 AFP
