This article is part of a new series at The Lemur called “Uncommon Ground,” in which Sherman Criner and Zachary Partnoy, the founders of The Lemur (and a conservative and a liberal, respectively) talk through a divisive issue in American politics with the intention of promoting civility and compromise.
In this first installment, we discuss the dangers of politicizing natural disasters, in light of California’s recent fires and the ongoing relief struggle in Western North Carolina.
Sherman: So, Zachary, what do you find so troubling about President Trump’s recent statements regarding California’s fires?
Zachary: Well, he’s literally playing with fire. It’s the worst impulse in our politics. Look, I’m from Southern California and I have been very distressed to witness President Trump’s cavalier politicization of the Los Angeles fires. Obviously, fires—like hurricanes, tornadoes, earthquakes, and tsunamis—know nothing about political geography. These fires have wrought untold human suffering and economic devastation. This kind of suffering, at the hand of Nature, should not be conditioned or caveated or asterisked for political reasons For context for readers who have not followed President Trump’s conduct on this issue, here’s a brief summary:
- Trump has suggested that federal funds for disaster relief to California should be conditioned on the state implementing a voter ID requirement.
- Trump also blamed the fires on forest mismanagement and water restoration policies implemented by the state government (California’s Governor Gavin Newsom is a major political opponent of Trump’s).
- Trump baselessly claimed that a recent California water-use law intended to protect smelt (a fish) was the cause of the lack of water supply for putting out the Los Angeles fires. On Day 1 in office, he signed an executive order vowing to “put people over fish” (this bucks a long tradition, of course, of American presidents insisting that man and fish can “coexist peacefully”).
This combination of inflammatory rhetoric and utterly wild policy suggestions has very, very real consequences. House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) has voiced support for conditioning federal aid to California on Trump’s unscientific criteria related to forest management, and even for using California fire aid as a bargaining chip in debt ceiling debates with Democrats. I say unscientific because wildfire experts have repeatedly rebuffed Trump’s claims that insufficient “raking” by forest management authorities are the cause of California’s increasingly devastating fires. These experts, by the way, have been particularly bewildered to see Trump deploy this attack in the context of fires in Southern California—how someone is supposed to “rake” the SoCal chaparral (dry scrub brush), I have no idea.
Los Angeles is one of the country’s largest metropolitan areas—its nearly 10 million inhabitants (including 1.2 million Trump voters) do not deserve to be endangered because of presidential pettiness. Working-class Angelenos do not deserve to be neglected because of Trump’s antipathy towards Hollywood elites and the Sacramento political establishment. In blunt terms, these groups—not just woke liberal elites—would suffer enormously in the event that Trump’s conditions did indeed delay federal aid. Interestingly, some Republican Congressional representatives in Southern California districts, such as Young Kim, have criticized President Trump for politicizing disaster relief. California Republicans may not be the strongest bloc in the House (certainly since the ouster of Kevin McCarthy), but this is an opportunity for the kind of principled defection which characterizes a well-functioning political party. But will we see more criticisms like Rep. Kim’s? I doubt it.
And, finally, setting aside Trump, it seems pretty clear that the provision of emergency aid in the wake of natural disasters is something which should obviously be the responsibility of the federal government. More concerning here is the longer political game implied by Trump’s desire to see states deal with aid on their own in the future (it is also more than eerily reminiscent of his approach to federal power-sharing, especially related to emergency medical equipment aid, during the COVID pandemic in 2020). From one side of his mouth, Trump tells Californians that “the federal government is standing behind you 100%,” and from the other he is publicly questioning the legitimacy of federal emergency aid and ordering an investigation into FEMA. It’s not clear if he realizes the contradiction here. If he is serious about actually ending or diminishing the federal government’s role here, that is very alarming. What would the damage be to our Union if the federal government—however insufficient FEMA aid has been in the recent past, including during Katrina—shrank from responsibility in natural disaster relief?
Sherman: I certainly agree with your point that the Trump administration is effectively abdicating one of the few legitimate purviews of the federal government by conditioning federal disaster relief on the implementation of various state-level policies like mandatory voter ID, immigration sanctuaries, and forest management. For all of my present disagreements with the bloated state of our modern federal government, it is unquestioned that one of the most basic duties of the national executive is to assist states when they cannot adequately protect their constituents. In a case like natural disaster relief, there is an immediate public safety threat that must take precedence, within the bounds of our constitutional order, over our more protracted domestic political squabbles.
With that said, I think you are slightly overplaying Trump’s misrepresentation of California’s management of its natural resources. Yes, President Trump has made false statements regarding Governor Newsom’s role in preventing water from being directed to Los Angeles’ fire hydrants (the two reservoirs that feed the hydrants, Lake Oroville and the Colorado River, are at stable levels). However, California’s recent history is riddled with examples of natural resource mismanagement that merit some criticism. Here are two (not to mention the numerous examples of California’s environmental groups slowing fire prevention efforts):
- In 2021, Gov. Newsom was found to have overstated his accomplishments in wildlife prevention efforts, like prescribed burns and fuel breaks, by an “astounding 690%”
- Cal Fire has seen delays in implementing legislatively mandated prescribed burns and, from 2018-2022, failed to send an annual report to the California legislature detailing its prevention work
Though not damning evidence by any stretch of the imagination, these examples suggest that the California government is not entirely without fault. More importantly, California’s long history of effective environmentalist lobbying by groups like the Sierra Club and Defenders of Wildlife has led to policies that often prioritize conservation over pragmatic land management. This influence can be seen in restrictions on controlled burns, limits on logging, and bureaucratic hurdles that delay necessary fire prevention measures. When viewed in this context, skepticism toward the state’s handling of the crisis is warranted—especially given that these policies have arguably exacerbated fire risks over time. These statewide environmental missteps, combined with municipal failures across the board in Democratic strongholds like Los Angeles and San Francisco, suggest that the issue is not just about local incompetence but about a broader ideological approach that has handicapped Democratic officials.
Nevertheless, such failures, no matter their scope, do not excuse the President of the United States from playing politics with the lives of American citizens by threatening to condition federal disaster relief.
Zachary: Look, it’s totally fair to criticize state and local government in California, and we should be doing that also. Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass, who came into the office with no executive experience, is demonstrably ill-equipped for crisis management. The city budget woefully underfunded the fire department. Let’s face it, LA was clearly insufficiently prepared for a disaster of this magnitude, despite warning signals by experts (and Santa Ana herself). These preventable political mistakes are what I identify as the real shortcomings in California, though—not state water-supply policy. Why were the fire hydrants in the Palisades running dry? Because firefighters could not refill the tanks quickly enough, not because the water was “elsewhere” or because the tap was not “turned on.”
But once you accept Trump’s premise that failed California environmental policies have something to do with how these specific fires broke out, I think you implicitly also swallow his notion that these failures are the inevitable result of callous, diversity-obsessed policymaking by “Radical Left” Democrats. Making that connection is precisely what Trump is doing when he links environmental policy conditions with immigration-related ones, like voter ID. That is what Trump is really doing here; even after his election victory, he is trying to convince Americans that Democrats care more about a radical, anti-common-sense agenda than human lives. That’s the shrewd and extremely unfair calculus going on when he suggests that Gavin Newsom cares more about an endangered fish than human beings, and it’s the kind of demonization we’ve come to expect from him as an agent of negative polarization.
I think it’s worth bringing in Hurricane Helene here, because certainly Donald Trump has also politically connected, in his own mind, that disaster with the California fires. Before his visit to Los Angeles, Trump stopped in western North Carolina, one of the areas that was hardest hit by last fall’s devastating hurricane. He told victims there: “you are not forgotten any longer.” Look, Sherman, you’re from North Carolina and you know a lot about NC politics, and I’m sure the idea that North Carolina’s Democratic Governor, Roy Cooper neglected to deal adequately with this crisis for political reasons is totally ridiculous. And I think when you give the time of day to criticisms of blue state environmental policies, that amounts to letting Trump win the “linkage politics” battle here.
When Trump links these “misguided” policies with the alleged insensitivity and detachment of Democratic politicians, he is expanding the arena of our polarized politics. In the case of Helene, of course, Trump infamously lambasted FEMA’s federal response, falsely asserting that FEMA money was instead directed to housing illegal immigrants. The real story there is that (to its credit) the Biden administration and FEMA endeavored to provide emergency services to the remote and unexpectedly hard-hit western North Carolina, which subsequently mobilized a stunningly high and Trump-favorable turnout in the November election.
So with that in mind, I’m going to rebut the natural resource management line a little bit. California is doing what it can, and its frustrating policy implementation shortcomings are no more egregious than those in any other state. For me, it’s a nonstarter of a premise to lay immediate blame on California environmental policy.
Sherman: California also deserves critical examination when it comes to its land management practices, and doing so is not the same as buying into Trump’s broader project of demonizing Democrats. There is a meaningful distinction between fair policy critiques and Trump’s brand of opportunistic blame-shifting, and I don’t think we should concede that space to him.
For example, you acknowledge that LA’s underpreparedness in this crisis was largely due to failures at the city level—poor budgeting decisions, a lack of executive experience in crisis management, and failure to heed expert warnings. But why should environmental and land management policy be exempt from similar scrutiny? If we can hold Mayor Bass accountable for local missteps, then surely we can also evaluate whether broader state policies have contributed to the conditions that make these fires so severe–esepcially given California’s well-documented history of caving to environmentalist groups. Trump’s attempt to distort those criticisms into an attack on Democratic priorities as a whole should not deter us from engaging in necessary discussions about whether the state is effectively managing its forests, brush clearance, and water resources.
Ultimately, I think we must be willing to separate substantive critiques from partisan narratives, especially when said narratives could impede the federal government’s emergency response. The real danger is allowing politicians like Trump and Newsome to dictate the terms of these debates—either by letting them set the framing unchallenged or by avoiding legitimate discussions out of fear that they might align with their rhetoric. Holding California accountable for its environmental policies is no different than holding any other state accountable for its disaster preparedness, and we should not hesitate to do so just because Trump happens to use that issue for his own political ends.
Zachary: Absolutely. And Trump is not the only one playing at this game, even though he is by far its “best” (or worst) player. Certainly Biden and Harris do not have a perfectly apolitical track record when it comes to natural disaster response. Infamously and infuriatingly, then-Vice President Kamala Harris asserted in 2022 that Hurricane Ian relief in Florida should be doled out based on “equity.” While her specific comments about Ian relief were twisted out of context, Harris’ larger point then about equity as a function of the government’s approach to climate change was possibly more alarming. Her comments raised serious questions about whether every individual American citizen mattered equally under the Democratic plan for climate change response, reinforcing skepticism about legislation like the Inflation Reduction Act and the proposed Green New Deal.
So, in some respects, the polarizing linkage politics here is a self-inflicted wound for Democrats. But Trump is making the problem so much worse. His immediate reaction to every disastrous climate event in America is to resort to the crass politics of personal retribution, instead of engaging in basic empathy and an impulse toward national healing. It’s an approach—the predictable byproduct of “everything is politics” polarization— that should no longer be tolerated by his acolytes and enablers. We don’t know what natural disasters are coming in the next four years, nor do we know whether the people who lose their homes and lives because of them voted for Trump or not. It shouldn’t matter.
So maybe we can summarize our agreement in the following contention:
“Natural disaster relief should be immune from political gamesmanship and politicization, especially over electoral and culture war issues.”
Sherman: Seems reasonable. After all, if we’re heading into the “Golden Age of America,” shouldn’t we at least start by prioritizing Americans’ lives over cheap political wins?
Zachary: Phew. At least we can agree on that. Next time, we’ll be discussing “the imperial presidency.” Should be fun.
