President Trump’s visit to view wildfire damage leaves questions about what federal aid will come
For a president who is widely analyzed for his rhetoric — with acclaim or acrimony, depending on your politics — it will be President Donald Trump‘s actions in the aftermath of devastating fires that will matter more to the Los Angeles region and its people.
And for that matter, it will be Trump’s actions that are remembered more.
The Republican president, just a few days after his inauguration, traveled to Southern California to survey the catastrophic devastation left by the Palisades fire, which broke out Jan. 7 amid extreme winds in the region and was just one of the fires that tore through Southern California as the new year began.
He didn’t fully set aside his criticism of Democratic state and local leaders — or California’s water and forest management policies — but he took a more subdued tone.
Trump shook hands with firefighters. He clasped hands with arch-foe Gov. Gavin Newsom.
He sat amid state and local leaders and vowed, “I’m going to give you everything you want.”
Trump left California on Friday evening, embarking on a short flight to Las Vegas for a campaign-style rally.
He left behind questions. Will Trump deliver? And just what will that look like?
“The history with Trump is that he needs to be judged by what he does,” said Zev Yaroslavsky, a former L.A. County supervisor and council member, whose districts spanned from the San Fernando Valley to the Westside and were heavily impacted by the Northridge quake in 1994.
“I’m not going to argue about what he says because that’s a waste of my breath,” said Yaroslavsky. “I’m interested in what he does and what he delivers.”
Matthew Beckmann, who teaches political science at UC Irvine and studies Washington politics, said there is only an upside for Trump to support Californians — Americans — who have lost everything in the wildfires.
Certainly, he said, there will be debates about costs and the processes.
Yet, “professional politicians understand that opponents on one issue can be allies on another,” said Beckmann, pointing to Trump and Newsom often locking horns.
“Even in today’s polarized world, helping fellow Americans who lost everything to a natural disaster is about as close as we get to bipartisan consensus.”
Some strings attached?
Unquestionably, Southern California will need a massive amount of federal disaster aid.
What’s questionable is what strings will be attached.
On Friday, while still on the East Coast, Trump proposed requiring California to change its water management strategies or establish a voter ID law before aid could come.
“I want to see two things in Los Angeles: Voter ID, so that the people have a chance to vote, and I want to see the water be released and come down into Los Angeles and throughout the state,” Trump said in North Carolina, where he was touring hurricane recovery efforts.
Historically, presidents have been reluctant to attach conditions to disaster relief, said Dan Schnur, who teaches political messaging at USC.
But Trump is a sui generis president.
“Most of the California politicians — from the governor on down — did everything they could to put him (Trump) in a good mood,” said Schnur. “But it’s impossible to guess how long that would last.
“The greater the conditions he attaches, the harder a trade-off it becomes for California’s political leaders.”
Changing how the state clears brush to prevent fires is a pretty easy exchange, Schnur noted.
The debt ceiling, well, that’s more complicated.
Requiring voter ID laws or a change in immigration policy? Now, that’s nearly futile.
Just ask Rep. Brad Sherman, D-Sherman Oaks. His 32nd Congressional District includes the Palisades, where 11 people died.
“There are people who live in the Palisades who agree with President Trump on everything,” Sherman said. “They are not supposed to get help in rebuilding because Sacramento does not agree on this or that issue? Again, I vote for aid for Louisiana because individuals need help, even though, God knows, I’d like to change Louisiana’s abortion laws.”
Louisiana is the home state of House Speaker Mike Johnson, a Republican who has suggested conditions should be imposed on aid for California.
Power players in fight for aid
As the kerfuffle about aid for California moves back to Washington, D.C., that makes Republican House members — particularly those in Southern California — particularly powerful.
Most Southern California House members on either side of the aisle have said they outright oppose attaching conditions to federal aid.
That includes Rep. Young Kim — who represents communities in Orange, Riverside and San Bernardino counties — who has had a bit of facetime with the president in recent weeks. Kim was part of the roundtable of officials who met with the president at a Palisades fire station on Friday, and she was part of a contingent of other Republicans who traveled to the president’s Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida ahead of the inauguration, where she implored him to put relief over politics.
“We cannot prioritize potential future political battles over supporting first responders battling those wildfires in our state,” Kim said, adding that imposing conditions would set a “bad precedent.”
Theoretically, it’ll be up to Congress to pass a disaster relief package or tie aid to a spending plan.
“On the one hand, the state very badly needs federal disaster relief aid, and California Republicans know that,” said Schnur. “On the other hand, he (Trump) needs their votes for legislative priorities. The challenge for California Republican House members going forward is how hard to push without pushing too far.”
On that front, Kim might be a much more important player in the fight for disaster aid than Newsom.
Sherman, who along with Kim was among the local officials at the roundtable on Friday, left the meeting thankful that Trump will consider exempting building materials from potential new tariffs to keep rebuilding costs lower.
He also said he left unclear whether Trump’s promises to “get it fixed” went beyond easing restrictions on federal permitting — restrictions Sherman said aren’t as relevant when most people’s building permits are local.
“In many ways, he seemed to be saying, not just permits, but aid. That’s the key thing. Money,” Sherman said.
And that’s where Kim and her fellow GOP members in Congress will be huge, he said.
In the aftermath of the wildfires in 2023 that devastated the island of Maui and destroyed the town of Lahaina, Congress appropriated a huge $1.6 billion housing-aid package for the fire.
“If you just count structures, that fire was one-eighth of ours (Palisades and Eaton),” Sherman said.
“We’re 16 times the amount of property. My hope is we get a federal appropriation of 16 times that,” he said.
“But Trump has such power over Republicans in the House that what we get from my Republican colleagues in the House is very much influenced by Trump.”
So what’s next?
In the aftermath of the devasting fires, it will be the aid and how quickly and easily it is accessed that will matter, not his bombastic rhetoric or the nicknames he gives the state’s chief executive on social media.
Sure, there were moments on Friday that weren’t exactly warm and fuzzy.
For instance, Newsom was not at the emergency roundtable meeting in the Palisades. And while they did have a cordial greeting on the LAX tarmac — at least in front of the cameras — Newsom noted on the eve of the visit that he had not heard from the White House. He, essentially, planned to “crash” the visit.
And Trump did spar with Sherman and L.A. Mayor Karen Bass at times during the meeting, engaging in a few heated exchanges.
But out of it all, one scenario might work out for all, in terms of federal aid, experts said.
In that scenario, Trump goes back to calling Newsom names and “kicking California.” And at the same time, he signs off on aid without conditions.
“Gavin’s a big boy, ” Sherman said. “If Trump needs to attack Gavin in the press once a week, well, everybody has their psychological needs.”
In that same scenario, California also has to help itself, and rebuild more fire-resistant homes and develop water delivery systems able to fight big fires, Sherman said.
A win-win after all? Potentially.
“I have to believe that it wasn’t a waste of time for him to see the devastation in person, in all three dimensions,” said Yaroslavsky, an expert on L.A. local government’s history and politics. “I just can’t believe that any human being, having seen that, would politicize the recovery.”