California Governor Gavin Newsom Invites Donald Trump To Witness the Firestorm Devastation: “We Must Not Politicize Human Tragedy.”

As the Los Angeles wildfires continue to cause devastation across the state, Governor Gavin Newsom invited President-elect Donald Trump, who has railed against the handling of the crisis without providing plausible alternatives, to view the growing destruction himself.

In a letter signed “With respect and an open hand” that Newsom posted on social media on Friday, the governor gave Trump the opportunity to walk around the state, thank first responders, and “meet with the Americans affected by these fires.”

“In the spirit of this great country, we must not politicize human tragedy or spread disinformation from the sidelines,” Newsom wrote, pointing to how the former and future president has responded to the wildfires over this past week. “Hundreds of thousands of Americans — displaced from their homes and fearful for the future — deserve to see all of us working in their best interest to ensure a fast recovery and rebuild.”

Newsom’s olive branch comes as Trump has called the governor “incompetent,” said he should resign, and repeatedly referred to him as “Newscum” on Truth Social. On Wednesday, as neighborhoods were burning down and tens of thousands of Angelenos were told to evacuate with little notice, Trump wrote that the fires “may go down, in dollar amount, as the worst in the History of our Country.” He also expressed concern about “whether insurance companies will even have enough money to pay for this catastrophe.”

To date, the fires have killed at least 11 people and burned more than 37,000 acres, an area bigger than San Francisco, according to reporting from the Washington Post based on Cal Fire. The flames have taken more than 12,000 structures and displaced tens of thousands.

As Vanity Fair’s Eric Lutz wrote this week, “The MAGA attacks on Democrats have been shameless and filled with flagrant lies, including Trump’s suggestion that FEMA money to aid Los Angeles has instead been spent by Joe Biden on the ‘Green New Scam,’ referring to the Green New Deal that was never actually enacted.”

The president-elect’s response mimics how he has responded to other environmental crises throughout his political career. According to Stephanie Grisham, who served as the White House press secretary under Trump from 2019 to 2020 and went on to support Vice President Kamala Harris’s 2024 campaign, one of the first questions Trump would ask if a state needed disaster aid while he was in office was, “Are they my people?”

When Hurricane Maria struck Puerto Rico in 2017, which led to thousands of deaths, Trump reportedly delayed disaster aid and diverted funding from FEMA to pay for his effort to return undocumented migrants to Mexico. A 2021 report by the Housing Department’s Office of the Inspector General found the Trump administration held up more than $20 billion in aid for Puerto Rico after the storm ravaged the island. Instead of providing this cash, he opted to throw paper towels into a crowd at a church in San Juan.

More recently, when Hurricane Helene hit the southeastern United States in late September, killing hundreds, Trump falsely claimed that North Carolina governor Roy Cooper was denying aid to Republican areas in the state. He also spread disinformation that Harris had “spent all her FEMA money, billions of dollars, on housing for illegal migrants.” That wasn’t true, according to a fact-check by the New York Times.

As fires have engulfed entire areas of Los Angeles this week, some on the right have baselessly argued that the devastation comes as a result of diversity initiatives within the city’s fire department—which is run by Kristin Crowley, a 25-year veteran of the department and the first woman and gay person in her role.

“Can we rename DEI to DIE since that’s what seems to happen to the people downstream of those who place woke virtue signaling far above competency?!?” Trump’s eldest son wrote on Truth Social. “They prioritized DEI over saving lives and homes,” billionaire and Trump ally Elon Musk wrote on his social media platform X.

“Los Angeles deliberately set out to exclude white men from becoming firefighters, and now they don’t have enough firefighters to prevent their city from burning to the ground,” right-wing commentator Matt Walsh wrote, also on X. “DEI is a cancer that destroys everything it touches.”

According to a CNN review of government reports and interviews with more than a dozen experts, a combination of climate change and reduced funding to respond to these kinds of crises met with “winds, unseasonably dry conditions, and multiple fires breaking out one after another in the same geographic region made widespread destruction inevitable.”

While people “could have taken some steps to potentially lessen the impact of Mother Nature’s wrath,” one expert told CNN that he didn’t know “a water system in the world that is that prepared for this type of event.”

Since the wildfires began to spread earlier this week, President Joe Biden approved a disaster declaration, committing additional federal assistance to the region, and said that the federal government will cover all of the fire management and debris removal costs for the next six months—past when Trump takes office.