Trump chastises the people of California
For Trump’s other loving contribution of the day, he decided to shout at California for being on fire.
Hours after officials announced grim new statistics in California’s Camp Fire — nine dead, more than 6,700 structures incinerated — President Trump blamed poor forest management for the destruction and threatened to pull federal funding.
“There is no reason for these massive, deadly and costly forest fires in California except that forest management is so poor,” Trump tweeted Saturday morning. “Billions of dollars are given each year, with so many lives lost, all because of gross mismanagement of the forests. Remedy now, or no more Fed payments!”
A normal president would express compassion and concern, and nothing else. While the fires are still blazing and eating people and their houses, a normal president would leave all anger and threats aside. I guess making American great again requires getting in people’s faces even as the fire is scorching them.
The latest tweet came as residents in Butte County, about 90 miles north of state capital Sacramento, described fleeing a catastrophic fire that began on Thursday grew with incredible speed and turned a sunny day into an end-of-days scene of flames, smoke, sparks and wide destruction.
Named Camp Fire for a nearby creek, the blaze is not yet done. It had burned at least 90,000 acres, more than 140 square miles, and was only 20 percent contained by Saturday morning, causing officials to declare a state of emergency for a fire likely to worsen over the weekend.
Officials warned that “red flag” conditions would persist on and off through Monday, hot, dry and windy weather that makes the land ripe for a fire’s spread.
Trump’s repeated rants about forest management seems to be his rebuttal to arguments that the fires are a result of climate change.
Trump has loudly and consistently blamed intensifying wildfires on poor resource management by California officials. Twice in October, Trump threatened to withhold federal wildfire funds from California because of what he alleged was poor forest management policy, The Fix’s Aaron Blake wrote.
Universally, California officials’ response has been that the real culprit behind intensifying wildfires is climate change.
As The Washington Post’s Angela Fritz wrote in July, a hotter-than average summer and dry winter have “led to tinder-dry vegetation,” in areas scorched by the Carr fire during Redding, California’s hottest July on record.
It’s hard work for Trump arguing that that’s all Jerry Brown’s fault.
I suppose Trump’s idea of ‘good’ forest management would be to flatten the lot, sell the lumbar, and build lots and lots of shiny Trump-branded monstrosities as far as the eye can see.
That’ll be ‘lumber’!
Good idea, that’ll fix it.
You know how Trump (claims) to be an expert on physics because his uncle was an MIT professor? Well, Trump is also an expert in forest management, because his father cut down some trees to make flaming crosses.
AoS: I think you’ve got the right idea. Well, not about selling the lumbar, that sounds painful ;) but if those pesky trees had been chopped down like they oughta, there would be nothing to burn. No forest, no forest fires. You don’t have to be a stable genius to work that out.
Odd how this is the appropriate time to berate CA for their forestry practices, when it always seems to be “too soon” to discuss gun control in the immediate aftermath of mass shootings.
As the Washington Post reported, the California Professional Firefighters president Brian Rice issued a response that I’ll copy here in full:
I admire how well that response was written. Trump is so blatantly narcissistic and solipsistic, it’s hard to know how to respond to him. I expect him to learn nothing, but people still need to say something. The response was intelligent to address the public more than the president, and to tell the public how the president was wrong and what he should do instead.
[…] a comment by Dave Ricks on Trump chastises the people of […]
He seems almost like he has some big grudge against California. What did that state ever do to him? Did some California NIMBY’s once object to some proposed Trump golf course?
Oh, gosh, so many ways – liberal, not a fan of his glorious self, never asked him to star in all the movies, etc etc etc.
Oh, gosh, so many ways – liberal, not a fan of his glorious self, never asked him to star in all the movies, etc etc etc
…Sanctuary state–
–resists Trump on climate science–
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/03/26/inside-californias-war-on-trump
And, hell, even Orange County is turning Blue.
Oops. Forgot the first blockquote. Sorry!