Tensions Flare Between Trump, Newsom Over Fire Response

SACRAMENTO, California — The relationship between Donald Trump and Gavin Newsom was always embittered.

But the fires tearing through Los Angeles — the kind of natural disaster that in the past brought some degree of cooperation between political rivals — have accelerated the feud between the incoming president and the ambitious California Democrat.

Fearing Trump will pick up where the two left off in 2020, when the then-president demanded policy concessions in exchange for federal disaster relief funding, Newsom in mere hours secured a disaster declaration for the fires from President Joe Biden this week while he was in Los Angeles, a process that can take weeks.

Biden later committed the federal government to covering all of the fire management and debris removal costs for the next six months.

There’s little doubt Trump and Newsom are on a collision course over everything from the environment to immigration in the nation’s largest, and one of its most-liberal, states. Already, Newsom and Democrats are preparing to spend tens of millions of dollars on legal battles with Trump’s federal government. But the fires — and the almost unimaginable destruction left in their wake — is offering the most vivid illustration yet that behind the partisan sniping are serious policy issues that affect millions of people and their access to basic services like housing, water and electricity.

“I don’t think we’ve wrapped our minds around the scale of it. It’s going to be tremendously expensive,” said Kevin Carroll, who was senior counsel to then-Homeland Security Secretary John Kelly during Trump’s first term. “I would not be surprised if Trump demands concessions for distributing disaster aid as if they were citizens of a foreign country and not Americans.

“Newsom has to do whatever is best for the citizens of California,” Carroll added. “Flattery often works with Trump. It’s a tough position he’s in.”

Trump and Newsom have yet to connect by phone, but Newsom said he reached out after the election. Aides to both men confirmed they haven’t spoken since the fires started Tuesday, though Newsom has indicated he planned more outreach. Newsom’s public appeals to Trump not to “play any politics” in times of crisis have so far been ignored as the incoming president deploys white-hot rhetoric savaging the governor’s performance and using the blazes to again portray California as a failed state.

“The president has made himself quite clear on the way he views Gavin Newsom and his abysmal job record as governor of California,” said a Trump official, granted anonymity to speak freely. The official added that Trump “loves California — he owns property there.”

Despite his attacks on Newsom — a top Biden and Kamala Harris surrogate whom Trump regularly referred to throughout the 2024 race as “Newscum” — the official said they expected Trump to cooperate with Newsom on the federal response to the fire after the inauguration.

Newsom, meantime, has largely kept his focus off Trump as he coordinates fire response with local and federal officials on the ground in Los Angeles. While he’s crafted a national brand around punching hard at Trump and Republicans, Newsom’s advisers stressed that he plans to refrain from lunging into every one of Trump’s spitballs.

“Our plan right now is, ‘Let’s react to what he does and not what he says,’” a Newsom adviser said. “Lives are on the line.”

Newsom’s positioning, which he’s described as an open hand, not a closed fist, is informed by the two years he overlapped in office with Trump — though he did make a pointed contrast between Biden and Trump on Tuesday when crediting the current president with swiftly approving federal grants for fire management.

During his first term in the White House they regularly tangled. Newsom at times worried that Trump might be getting the upper hand by throwing out what he saw as an outrageous idea, whipping Democrats into a frenzy, and dominating the debate before quickly moving on to another buzzy topic. People close to Newsom describe him as something of a left-coast general in the larger culture war and they contend Trump and his supporters believe that for them to succeed, California must fail.

“Trump will say he hasn’t done anything. He’s trying to create this narrative of incompetence and it’s completely false,” the Newsom adviser said. “Trump is the one trying to use a human tragedy to score political points and spread disinformation. It’s the same chaos that we saw in the first administration.”

There have been times of agreement, such as when Newsom heaped praise on Trump’s assistance to California to help fight the pandemic, or said during the state’s 2020 fires that the pair cooperated just fine, despite trading public insults. Both men also have occasionally offered warmer assessments of the other, hinting at something approaching a shared fascination.

“I was there in Paradise when Donald Trump and Gavin Newsom and Jerry Brown actually all met together and really worked cooperatively in the aftermath of the Camp fire,” said Republican state Assemblymember James Gallagher, who represents the northern Sacramento Valley and is the minority leader. “And I really think that’s probably the place we need to get back to.”

Gallagher predicted that Trump and Newsom will figure out a way to work together this time, too, despite the heated rhetoric around the Los Angeles fires.

“Behind closed doors, these guys seem to be able to find ways to cooperate, even if they don’t do so publicly,” he said.

Trump’s demands of Newsom are the same ones he made in 2019 and 2020, and reiterated both on the 2024 campaign trail and in the days since the fires started. He wants the governor to “open up the water main” and allow “beautiful, clean, freshwater to FLOW INTO CALIFORNIA!” as Trump recently wrote online.

Trump’s phrasing is a vast oversimplification, and his linking of the dispute over statewide water delivery to hydrants in Los Angeles is off base. At the heart of it, he and Newsom disagree about how much water should be pumped out of the state’s main rivers, which combine in the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta, to the drier farms of the Central Valley and cities of Southern California, and how much water should be kept in the ecosystem to keep declining fish populations alive, including the Delta smelt, a frequent Trump target.

As POLITICO reported, their separate plans for the pumps make only marginal differences in actual water deliveries, and California reservoirs of late have been flush with water, but the plans have taken on a political life of their own.

“The delta water issues have absolutely nothing to do with the fires in LA.,” said Karen Skelton, a Democratic strategist from California and former senior Biden Energy Department official. “Spending even 10 seconds answering [Trump’s] inane comments would be political malpractice and this governor has much more serious things to worry about.”

That doesn’t mean the insults won’t keep coming.

Calling Newsom a “slimy politician,” the Trump official contended the then-president “was there for California when he needed to be,” citing Trump’s signing of a 2020 memorandum that allowed the federal government to send additional water from Northern California to central and southern parts of the state. Newsom sued, arguing that doing so endangered some fish species nearing extinction.

Trump has also repeatedly criticized the state over its forest management, reviving attacks when wildfires burned in 2018, 2019 and 2020, points Newsom officials push back hard on, emphasizing the 700,000-plus acres the state has fireproofed.

Newsom had mostly kept his past dealings with Trump private. But last fall, after a report by POLITICO’s E&E News found Trump was partisan in response to disasters and hesitated to give aid to areas he considered politically hostile, the governor told POLITICO about what he described as a surreal experience.

He said Trump was obsessed with the topic of disaster relief — to the point he was “threatening to withhold the money, unless I do his bidding on the Endangered Species Act and break the law and decide to go and find some big wrench so I can open the spigot [and] flood everything, and there’ll be more peaches and pears for everyone.”

“He was very threatening,” Newsom said. “He was telling me right before the [2020] election, ‘You better work with me now, because I’m going to get reelected and you’re going down on this.’”

Trump will likely soon be in touch with North Dakota Gov. Doug Burgum on some federal decisions related to the fire. Burgum, his nominee for Interior secretary, has remained busy on Capitol Hill this week preparing for his upcoming confirmation hearings.

Burgum and Newsom know each other and have worked together through the Western Governors Association, and the two were seen sharing a friendly handshake in front of a gaggle of reporters in September, ahead of the Philadelphia debate between Trump and Harris.

The Trump official said the president-elect “has always expressed a willingness to work with anybody, especially when it’s in the interest of the American people.”