California Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) swiftly dismissed Donald Trump’s efforts to “play politics” on Wednesday after the president-elect blamed him for the devastating Los Angeles wildfires that have killed at least five people.
“One can’t even respond to it,” said Newsom in an interview with CNN’s Anderson Cooper as the two stood in front of a burning property.
“People are literally fleeing, people have lost their lives, kids lost their schools, families completely torn asunder, churches burned down. This guy wanted to politicize it. I have a lot of thoughts and I know what I want to say. I won’t.”
Newsom told Cooper that he was “proud” to stand next to Joe Biden earlier in the day as the president met with officials fighting the fires in Los Angeles.
“And he had the backs of every single person in this community. He didn’t play politics, didn’t try to divide any of us,” said Newsom, who declared a state of emergency in California on Tuesday.
Newsom’s comments arrive after the president-elect — in a rant on his Truth Social platform earlier in the day — blamed the governor for the deadly fires, which have impacted multiple neighborhoods and destroyed numerous structures in the Los Angeles area.
Trump would later take to social media to call for Newsom’s resignation, claiming that the fires were “all his fault.”
Trump, in the earlier post where he referred to Newsom as “Newscum,” claimed the governor refused to sign a “water restoration declaration” that could’ve helped prevent the fires “currently burning in a virtually apocalyptic way.”
Sacramento’s NBC affiliate KCRA found Trump’s claim to be “false” and Newsom’s office said such a document by that name is non-existent.
Elsewhere in the post, the president-elect blamed efforts to protect delta smelt (a species that’s considered endangered which he dubbed an “essentially worthless fish”) for the wildfires.
He also complained that there’s “no water for fire hydrants, not firefighting planes.” (Officials have blamed “tremendous demand” amid the wildfires for water storage tanks running dry. California’s forestry and fire protection department says it has the “largest civil aerial firefighting fleet in the world”).
Trump, while campaigning in California in October, vowed to take care of farmers’ “water situation” by threatening to withhold disaster aid in the state.
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“We’ll force it down his throat and we’ll say, Gavin, if you don’t do it, we’re not giving you any of that fire money that we send you for all the forest fires that you have,” said the president-elect at a campaign rally in Coachella.
Former Trump White House aides told Politico’s E&E News last year that Trump “initially refused” to approve aid for California due to its “Democratic leanings” following the state’s deadly 2018 wildfires.