Rick J. Caruso, the wealthy developer, spent $100 million to run for mayor of Los Angeles in 2022. After his decisive defeat, he stepped to the side of the public stage.
But this year, in the weeks and months following the devastating January wildfires, Mr. Caruso has behaved almost as if he won that election. He has been cheerleading businesses trying to reopen, offering advice to homeowners looking for help in rebuilding and assailing the woman who defeated him, Mayor Karen Bass.
As Ms. Bass has faced scrutiny over her response to the fires, Mr. Caruso — with a staff of consultants and a stream of top-quality videos — has sought to present himself as something of a shadow mayor, a business executive who can lead Los Angeles out of this crisis.
“Hi everybody, it’s Rick Caruso, and I’ve got some great news for everybody,” he proclaimed the other day on Instagram, standing on a balcony overlooking the Grove, his high-end mall in Los Angeles. “We’ve got some small businesses that are reopening in the Palisades and Altadena.”
In recent weeks, he has urged administrators to reopen schools that were destroyed by the fires, told homeowners where to go to ensure that the Army Corps of Engineers clears their property and urged people to patronize the few stores that have reopened amid the rubble. The commission of civic and business leaders he created in the days after the fires, called Steadfast LA, has made a show of raising money and proposing how to rebuild.
In many cases, Mr. Caruso is pushing City Hall to take steps it has already taken: Los Angeles has already begun issuing fast-tracked building permits for the Palisades and led extensive campaigns informing people of how to get debris cleared. That Instagram post was put out hours after the mayor visited the same business whose opening he was lauding.
Still, on social media and in interviews and public appearances that often seem timed to compete with official events at City Hall, Mr. Caruso has painted Ms. Bass as being in over her head and Los Angeles as being slow to respond to the fires and their aftermath.
“The city needs to step up and pay for the cleanup for small business and residents who are uninsured and can’t afford to clean their property,” he said in a post on X. He sent an email to supporters criticizing Los Angeles for “drowning people in red tape and dragging out approvals while entire communities sit in limbo.”
At the same time, Mr. Caruso spoke out against an unpopular effort to recall Ms. Bass that’s being led by Nicole Shanahan, a wealthy donor who was Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s running mate in the 2024 presidential election. But even in opposing the recall, Mr. Caruso returned to his central criticism of the city. “This is a time when Los Angeles needs unity, not costly and expensive political distractions,” he wrote in a post on X. “We must rebuild our communities, get people back into their homes, and open businesses that have been closed or lost.”
Mr. Caruso, 66, a former Republican and independent who changed his registration to Democratic as he prepared to challenge Ms. Bass, is now considering re-entering politics. His associates say he’s deciding whether to challenge Ms. Bass or instead run for governor in 2026, when Gavin Newsom, the Democratic incumbent, will be forced to step aside because of term limits.
“I’m a big believer, I have always been my whole life, that elected officials need to be held accountable and take responsibility for their actions,” Mr. Caruso said in an hourlong interview from his third-floor offices next door to a See’s Candies store in the Grove. “The reason I was critical during the fire is that I was absolutely astounded by the failures in leadership that resulted in thousands and thousand of homes being destroyed.”
The mayor’s office noted that Ms. Bass has, in fact, issued sweeping executive orders to streamline permitting, house those displaced by the fires and encourage more resilient rebuilding. Debris is being cleared. Power is back online in the fire areas under her jurisdiction and drinking water has been restored. The city issued its first rebuilding permits to homeowners less than two months after the fires — roughly twice as fast as the response to other major fires, including the Camp and Woolsey fires in 2018.
“At a time of tragic loss of life and property, it’s unfortunate that he would choose to be undermining,” said Zach Seidl, a spokesman for Ms. Bass.
Mr. Caruso appears to be keeping his political options open as he considers a run for mayor or governor. He talks both about the fire in the Pacific Palisades, which is in the city of Los Angeles, and the fire in Altadena, which is in an unincorporated section of Los Angeles County, and thus outside the mayor’s jurisdiction.
When he ran for mayor in 2022, Mr. Caruso campaigned as a manager and an executive with a successful record of building and development. It was a message that did not resonate with most Los Angeles voters: Ms. Bass drew about 55 percent of the vote, compared with 45 percent for Mr. Caruso. But many Republicans and Democrats suggest that after the fires, Los Angeles might be receptive to that kind of appeal from a wealthy business leader.
“He’s a get-results kind of guy, and this may be his moment,” said Mike Murphy, a Republican political consultant who is a longtime friend and adviser.
While Mr. Caruso criticized Ms. Bass’s performance — “I do not have confidence in her ability to oversee the city as it goes through this massive reconstruction project,” he said — he offered praise for the other officials at the front lines of the fire response. They included Mr. Newsom, a Democrat, and two members of the county board of supervisors, Kathryn Barger, a Republican, and Lindsey P. Horvath, a Democrat, whose districts were caught in the path of the blazes.
Still, Mr. Caruso, several analysts said, risks undermining the mayor’s authority at a crucial moment, complicating and politicizing an already daunting rebuilding task that faces Los Angeles in the coming years and decades.
“The optics are terrible,” said Stephen Commins, a lecturer at the Luskin School of Public Affairs at the University of California, Los Angeles, who has studied the government response to disasters. “I could write you a long script of everything that went wrong in the city of L.A. But jumping into the dog pile and pummeling people, or acting like you are a parallel government, is very destructive.”
Isaac Bryan, a Democratic state assemblyman who represents much of southwestern Los Angeles and is an ally of the mayor, criticized Mr. Caruso for the path he has taken. “This is not the moment to attack,” he said. “This is the moment to come together and speak with a united voice.”
These events are a new chapter for Mr. Caruso, who seemed convinced for most of his 2022 campaign that he was going to win the election. He was discouraged by the magnitude of his defeat, friends said, and mostly turned his attention back to his prosperous business. Ms. Bass, a well-known liberal in a Democratic-run town, had hit the ground running, secure in her popularity and the breadth of her victory.
But the fires that swept across large parts of Los Angeles — including Pacific Palisades, the coastal enclave where Mr. Caruso owned a high-end shopping center and where two of his children owned homes — upended California’s political landscape. Hours after the Palisades fire broke out, he was on the news, criticizing Ms. Bass for leaving Los Angeles to attend the inauguration of Ghana’s president, despite the warnings of an incoming fire risk.
Shortly thereafter, he created his Steadfast LA commission. Mr. Caruso said he called Ms. Bass the day he announced its creation. “She sent me a text back, but she hasn’t called me,” he said. He declined to share the text, saying only that she had wished his group luck.
This moment is the latest resurgence for a man who has been at the periphery of civic life in Los Angeles, the city where he was born, since Mayor Tom Bradley put him on the Police Commission in 1986. He went on to serve as its president, and to become the chair of the board of trustees at the University of Southern California, where he went to college.
Should Mr. Caruso try to enter politics again, the path may not be easy, in no small part because of his history as a Republican in a city that has grown increasingly Democratic over the years and has become an epicenter for anti-Trump sentiment. Mr. Caruso and President Trump have some things in common: party-switching developers who have never made much of an effort to conceal their wealth.
“I have not been a supporter of Trump, but I’m glad he came,” Mr. Caruso said of the president’s visit to Los Angeles 17 days after the fires.
In an episode that would likely be reprised by opponents should he run, Mr. Caruso retained a private firefighting force that protected the outdoor shopping center he built in the Palisades. Mr. Caruso’s property now stands unscorched in the midst of fields of rubble.
“Democrats have sort of had it with rich businessmen who’ve never spent a day in office running for high posts,” said Garry South, a longtime Democratic political strategist based in Los Angeles.
Mr. Caruso was forced to evacuate his home in Brentwood when the power went out as the fires raged and as his family members sat down to celebrate his 66th birthday. After learning the hydrants were running out of water, he said, he put in a call to Elex Michaelson, a reporter and host on FOX 11 Los Angeles.
Mr. Caruso dismissed the suggestion that his campaign of criticism against the mayor was motivated by political ambitions.
“You should interpret it as the father that heard that his daughter’s house just burned out and all of her dreams of raising a family there went down with it,” he said. “And so I just reject this notion of there was any politics to it. It was a very personal thing.”
Laurel Rosenhall contributed reporting.
Adam Nagourney is a national political reporter for The Times, covering the 2024 campaign. More about Adam Nagourney
Shawn Hubler is based in Sacramento and covers California news, policy trends and personalities. She has been a journalist for more than four decades. More about Shawn Hubler
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