President Donald Trump is scheduled to make his first presidential trip of his second term to Los Angeles on Friday to visit the site of the Palisades fire.
Which devastated a large swath of the city after criticizing political leaders in the city and California for their handling of the unprecedented disaster, which has killed at least 28 people.
According to his official schedule, Trump will fly to Los Angeles on Air Force One this afternoon and arrive at Los Angeles International Airport around 5:40 p.m. He may be met by a familiar face he would rather not see, as Gov. Gavin Newsom has stated that he will be on the tarmac when Trump arrives. California’s governor and the president have already sparred verbally, and Newsom was mentioned as a prospective presidential candidate last year; most recently, Trump attacked Newsom and others during the wildfires this month.
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First Lady Melania Trump will accompany Trump on his visit, which will include an aerial tour of the city’s damage and a roundtable conversation at a Pacific Palisades firehouse. L.A. Mayor Karen Bass and L.A. County Supervisor Kathryn Barger are slated to meet with Trump, as are other officials, including Democratic Rep. Brad Sherman, who represents the Palisades Fire impacted region.
On Thursday, Newsom was in Los Angeles to sign a $2.5 billion wildfire relief measure into law. However, federal financing for the still-burning blazes—with four new fires sparking this week—is questionable as Trump begins his second term with a profound dislike for California’s politics and leaders.
Trump spoke with reporters before leaving the White House for North Carolina on Friday, claiming that the flames in Los Angeles “could have been put out,” but “they still haven’t for whatever reason.”
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“It would be fine if they turned the water on,” Trump said after landing in North Carolina. “I want to see the water be released and come down into Los Angeles and throughout the state.”
The president also repeated his earlier threat to withdraw federal disaster relief payments from California due to his disagreements with the state’s water regulations and voter ID requirements; this is a frequently discussed, sensitive issue for Trump.
On Wednesday, he told Fox News anchor Sean Hannity that Gov. Newsom “can release the water that comes from the north” to help put out the flames, and that the U.S. government shouldn’t “give California anything” until its policies reflect this plan. He also expressed his dissatisfaction with the state’s voter ID requirements while speaking on Fox News.
“I’ve got a condition. In California, we want voter ID so that people can have a voice, because they don’t have one right now because you don’t know who’s voting, and it’s very corrupt,” he told Hannity. “If they released the water when I told them to, because I told them to do it seven years ago, if they would’ve done it, you wouldn’t have had the problem.”
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Trump said that Newsom “refused to sign the water restoration declaration,” which would allow water from Northern California to flow into Los Angeles. Environmental groups opposed the idea to transfer water from the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta downstate, citing concerns about the impact on endangered salmon and smelt.
When Trump arrives in Los Angeles, he will be briefed on the situation and will tour the Pacific Palisades, which has been devastated by the largest and most destructive fire in the city’s history, which began on January 7 and is still only 77 percent contained. Trump will spend little over three hours in Southern California before heading to Las Vegas; nevertheless, on Friday, he had some optimistic words for the country’s second-largest metropolis.
“We’re going to take care of Los Angeles,” he told me.
Last week, Trump said in a Truth Social post that three stars who have backed him politically — Mel Gibson, Sylvester Stallone, and Jon Voight — would be his eyes and ears in Hollywood.
“It will again be, like the United States of America itself, the Golden Age of Hollywood!” he wrote in the post, referring to the three as special envoys.
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