LA fires show how Donald Trump will lead during a crisis
The fires ravaging Los Angeles this past week have offered a preview (or reminder) of how the incoming Donald Trump administration handles a crisis: with bluster, mean nicknames and straight-up lies.
Trump’s most recent missive on the fires — which have killed at least 16 people and displaced 150,000 — was via his Truth Social platform:
The fires are still raging in L.A. The incompetent pols [politicians] have no idea how to put them out. This is one of the worst catastrophes in the history of our Country. They just can’t put out the fires. What’s wrong with them?
For the president-elect, this is comparatively tame. Previously he had been bombarding California Governor Gavin Newsom (dubbed “Newscum”) and other Democrats with a series of largely evidence-free (and at times entirely fabricated) criticisms:
“Governor Gavin Newscum refused to sign the water restoration declaration put before him that would have allowed millions of gallons of water, from excess rain and snow melt from the North, to flow daily into many parts of California, including the areas that are currently burning in a virtually apocalyptic way,” Trump posted last week.
Newsom’s office replied that “there is no such document as the water restoration declaration”.
Republican Senator John Barrasso backed Trump’s argument on CBS, blaming the fires on the Newsom administration’s “liberal policies” and arguing there ought to be “strings attached” to emergency aid the state received.
Meanwhile, sentient smirk Donald Trump Jr. treated the deadly Californian fire as an opportunity to try out some wordplay, posting a reference to the LA Fire Department’s diversity, equity and inclusion policies: “Can we rename DEI to DIE since that’s what seems to happen to the people downstream of those who place woke virtue signaling far above competency?!?” (Los Angeles currently has its first openly LGBTQIA+ fire chief in Kristin Crowley, so naturally that’s been treated as a factor.)
Returning to Jonestown
Elon Musk has also been pushing the argument that the LA Fire Department has been too busy prioritising feelings over fires, yet somehow that’s the sanest commentary he’s made on the disaster.
When perennially disgraced conspiracy theorist Alex Jones posted on Musk’s platform X that “Los Angeles Fires Are Part Of A Larger Globalist Plot To Wage Economic Warfare & Deindustrialize The Untied [sic] States Before Triggering Total Collapse”, Musk responded. “True” (Musk has since deleted the tweet).
It’s great to see these two are getting along so well these days. Following his purchase of the social media platform in October 2022, Musk initially resisted calls to reinstate Jones’ account, which had been banned for serial disinformation regarding the Sandy Hook school shooting.
Citing the death of his 10-week-old child in 2002, Musk wrote he had “no mercy for anyone who would use the death of children for gain, politics or fame”. But a little over a year later, Jones was reinstated.
Musk, of course, was prominently involved in trying to get Trump elected and will head, with Vivek Ramaswamy, Trump’s government efficiency program. But not if former Trump adviser Steve Bannon has anything to do with it.
“He is a truly evil guy, a very bad guy. I made it my personal thing to take this guy down,” Bannon told an Italian newspaper in a story picked up over the weekend by Bannon’s former employer, Breitbart. “Before, because he put money in, I was prepared to tolerate it — I’m not prepared to tolerate it any more.”
“I will have Elon Musk run out of here by inauguration day”, he promised, giving himself just over a week to limit the tech billionaire’s influence. “He will not have full access to the White House. He will be like any other person.”
He also mentioned that “white South Africans” are the “most racist people on earth”, which we assume was intended as an insult in this case, given Bannon once told a contingent of France’s far-right politicians that they ought to wear the term “as a badge of honour”. It’s hard to be sure.
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