What did Donald Trump do today?

He lied about an ongoing fire disaster to score political points.

Yesterday, fires broke out in several locations in the Los Angeles area. Fueled by years-long drought and high winds and temperatures, they quickly became major disasters that have already claimed lives and are expected to result in many billions of dollars in damages.

The Palisades fire on Wednesday. (Karen Ballard, CNN)

This morning, Trump tried to put the blame for this on his political enemies, President Biden and California governor Gavin Newsom. In the process, he spread dangerous lies about the cause of the fires and the reasons that they hadn't been contained yet.

As Newsom's office immediately pointed out, none of this is true. There was never any such thing as a "water restoration declaration." Even with the drought, there is no shortage of water available to fight fires with. The reason that some hydrants are empty is that they are fed by water lines that have been destroyed by the fires themselves.

Trump seems to be saying that he thinks water flows from mountains in Northern California into reservoirs in southern California, and then uphill without human intervention into the mountains that surround Los Angeles, where the fires are currently burning.

This would not be the first time Trump has been dangerously confused about how fire works. In 2018, as president, he claimed that the reason California had devastating forest fires and Finland did not is that Finland "raked" their forests clean. (California is hot and dry; Finland, which is smaller, is cold and wet.) Finland's president had to publicly deny that he had told Trump any such thing.

The question now is whether Trump will use the opportunity to punish Americans living in California by withholding disaster relief aid once he takes office. He has done this many times before, forcing Americans to endure uncertainty about whether their government would help them rebuild simply because they lived in states with Democratic governors, or shutting down relief to Puerto Rico because its leaders criticized his administration's botched response to Hurricane Maria. But he also slow-walked disaster responses in Republican-dominated states like Georgia and Utah because their governors refused to go along with his attempt to overturn the 2020 election.

In fact, Trump specifically threatened California and Newsom on the campaign trail, saying in October 2024 that if Newsom refused to go along with Trump's proposed agricultural policies, “We’ll force it down his throat, and we’ll say, ‘Gavin, if you don’t do it, we’re not giving you any of that fire money that we send you all the time for all the forest fires that you have.’”

Trump, a climate-change denier, blamed California wildfires that happened during his watch on "exploding trees."
 

Why does this matter?

• Past a certain point in a crisis, it doesn't matter if someone is stupid or lying.

• Undermining faith in the basic competence of government and making people dependent on the leader's whim for help is what dictators do.cli

• None of this was about Trump and he didn't need to make it about him.