January 24, 2025 03:42 PM UTC

Trump Extorts California For Disaster Relief Funds

•  
• by: Colorado Pols

KABC-TV Los Angeles reports ahead of President Donald Trump’s arrival this afternoon in the city to politicize survey the devastation from recent wildfires that have burned thousands of homes, including some of the most exclusive neighborhoods in the whole country–damage that Trump has falsely blamed on measures to protect fish in the central part of the state, and a lack of available water that local officials insist was not the fault of statewide distribution systems.

Today, Trump escalated the hostile response to what could end up being the most expensive wildfire in history with a demand for political concessions in exchange for disaster relief aid, which to our knowledge has never happened before:

President Donald Trump on Friday continued to blast California’s response to the wildfires, and seemed to add a new condition on additional aid for the wildfires.

“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 the state. Those are the two things,” Trump said.

Gov. Gavin Newsom’s office responded to Trump’s comments about California’s provision of water and his calls to condition additional aid for disaster response.

In an X post, the office said that “conditioning aid for American citizens is wrong.”

It’s one thing for Trump to complain about water policy in regard to these wildfires, even though by every expert’s account Trump is completely wrong. But to demand a policy change totally unrelated to either water policy or wildfires in exchange for aid following a devastating natural disaster is so far beyond unacceptable that it confounds a rational response. Imagine the outrage from Republicans if former President Joe Biden had conditioned aid to states hit by major hurricanes last year on, say, abortion rights. We cannot, because Biden actually attempting something like that would have been totally unthinkable. Biden would have been impeached, or even made subject to the 25th Amendment, for daring to extort North Carolina the way Trump is casually threatening to do in California.

No matter what your politics are, if you’re not urgently worried about what this means for Colorado’s next fire season, you should be. As readers know we are similarly on Trump’s radar.