President-elect Donald Trump will likely travel to California next week to view the aftermath of the devastating wildfires in greater Los Angeles, he told NBC News’ “Meet the Press” moderator Kristen Welker in a phone interview Saturday.
“I will be, probably, at the end of the week,” Trump said, just two days before he’s set to be inaugurated for a second term.
“I was going to go, actually yesterday,” the president-elect added, “but I thought it would be better if I went as president. It’s a little bit more appropriate, I suspect.”
Trump’s planned trip comes as wildfires have raged across Southern California for more than a week, destroying homes and businesses and displacing residents.
California Gov. Gavin Newsom, a Democrat, invited Trump to come to his state to view the destruction last week as Trump unleashed an escalating series of attacks against Newsom, President Joe Biden and Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass on social media.
On the first major day of destruction, Trump blasted Newsom on Truth Social, baselessly claiming the governor had blocked a plan Trump proposed in his first term to move water from Northern California to Southern California.
“Governor Gavin Newscum refused to sign the water restoration declaration put before him that would have allowed millions of gallons of water, from excess rain and snow melt from the North, to flow daily into many parts of California, including the areas that are currently burning in a virtually apocalyptic way,” Trump wrote, using an insulting nickname for Newsom.
In that post, Trump added that Newsom “wanted to protect an essentially worthless fish called a smelt, by giving it less water (it didn’t work!)” and “he is the blame for this.”
In another post, Trump wrote, “NO WATER IN THE FIRE HYDRANTS, NO MONEY IN FEMA. THIS IS WHAT JOE BIDEN IS LEAVING ME. THANKS JOE!” appearing to lean into a false conspiracy theory about the Federal Emergency Management Agency that he and other Republicans spread last year in the aftermath of multiple hurricanes in the South.
In a Truth Social post later in the week, Trump even blamed “Gross incompetence by Gavin Newscum and Karen Bass” for the wildfire destruction.
Newsom responded to Trump last week in an interview with NBC News’ “Meet the Press,” saying that “responding to Donald Trump’s insults” would take “another month.”
“I’m very familiar with them. Every elected official that he disagrees with is very familiar with them,” he added.
Trump is “somehow connecting the delta smelt to this fire, which is inexcusable because it’s inaccurate. Also, incomprehensible to anyone that understands water policy in the state,” Newsom added.
The governor also said he believes the wildfires will be one of the worst natural disasters in U.S. history.
“I think it will be in terms of just the costs associated with it, in terms of the scale and scope,” Newsom said.
Now, on the weekend before his second inauguration, Trump said he has not spoken to Newsom directly since the wildfires broke out.
Asked whether he planned to include disaster relief for California in his list of priorities for Day 1, Trump said, “We’re going to, no, we’re going to [look] at it from a lot of standpoints. We’re going to be demanding that the water be released from the north into the lower parts of California.”
The debate over releasing water from northern parts of the state to southern parts first erupted between Trump and California officials in 2020.
Then-President Trump signed a presidential memorandum that sought to divert water from Northern California to farmland in the center and the south of the state.
“[It’s] going to give you a lot of water, a lot of dam, a lot of everything. You’ll be able to farm your land, and you’ll be able to do things you never thought possible,” Trump said at an event announcing the memo in California in 2020.
At the time, Newsom and then-California Attorney General Xavier Becerra publicly denounced Trump’s plan, with Becerra calling it a “harmful attack on our state’s critical ecosystems and environment.”
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