The disaster aid California needs shouldn't come with conditions

Onetime Trump “true believer” Stephanie Grisham, former press secretary to both Donald and Melania, famously told a national TV audience during last summer’s Democratic National Convention that she knows firsthand that the president “has no empathy, no morals and no fidelity to the truth.” She recalled the advice Trump gave her for serving as his spokesperson: “It doesn’t matter what you say, Stephanie — say it enough and people will believe you.” Now add to those traits Trump’s long-established refusal to see himself as a president for all Americans, notably those who didn’t vote for him, and Trump’s behavior toward Los Angeles in its time of need this month was as predictable as the urban infernos that erupted when a once-in-a-generation event — hurricane-force Santa Ana winds meeting drought-parched landscape — turned sparks and embers into incendiary devices, and homes into just more kindling.

In an unprecedented act, Trump has been demanding conditions on federal disaster aid for California, even as he explicitly seeks none from the mostly red states that are rebuilding their lives, homes, businesses and infrastructure after last fall’s hurricanes in the southeastern United States. During his mostly polite visit to L.A.



last week, Trump didn’t repeat those demands to Californians’ faces. Perhaps the state can hope he’s changed. But that’s never been a good bet.

From the fires’ start, the know-it-all Trump has peddled his preposterous claim that if the states’ Democratic leaders — led by Gov. Gavin “Newscum,” in his words — would just turn on some valve in Northern California, they’d “allow beautiful, clean, fresh water to FLOW” to the rescue, as he posted on his social media site on Jan. 8.

Even in his inaugural address, he lied , claiming the wildfires were burning “without even a token of defense” — as firefighters from as far as Canada and Mexico risked their lives through 24- and 48-hour shifts. Trump is still spreading such disinformation despite countless fact-based assurances that a valve in Northern California wasn’t the issue when the conflagration began on Jan. 7.

Because, you know, say it enough and people will believe you. Near midnight on Monday, Trump let loose the most ludicrous version of the lie: “The United States Military just entered the Great State of California and under Emergency Powers, TURNED ON THE WATER flowing abundantly from the Pacific Northwest, and beyond. The days of putting a Fake Environmental argument, over the PEOPLE, are OVER.

Enjoy the water, California!!!” The next day the president’s new spokesperson, Karoline Leavitt, opened her first-ever White House briefing by repeating it, praising the boss because “the water was turned on” in California. That action, Leavitt said, was thanks to Trump’s “pressure campaign ..

. on state and local officials there who clearly lack all common sense.” Except that action didn’t happen.

Take it from Trump-friendly Fox News, whose Pentagon correspondent Jennifer Griffin tweeted just before Leavitt’s briefing: “US defense officials tell me they did not send troops to ‘turn on the water’ in California, despite President Trump’s claims overnight.” Griffin was confirming the same message from the California Department of Water Resources. Trump’s lies and misinformation are bad enough when Americans are reeling from natural disasters; then-candidate Trump dissembled as well last fall in misleading hurricane victims from Florida to southwest Virginia about the Biden administration’s emergency response.

But what’s truly outrageous is Trump’s repeated politicization of federal disaster aid, especially when blue California is the suffering state. It’s a truism of politics: If any issue transcends partisanship, it’s disaster aid. After all, federal assistance goes mostly to victims, not to state or local leaders.

Some of those victims voted for Trump. As if that should matter: Only a politician with “no empathy, no morals” would condition disaster aid to a state that didn’t vote for him. It’s clear that Trump is playing politics.

His projection is always a tell. In North Carolina on Friday before flying to L.A.

, Trump falsely complained that, under Biden, federal help had been too slow in getting to that hurricane-ravaged state “for political reasons” — because North Carolina didn’t vote for Biden in 2020. To a reporter’s question, he said he wouldn’t put conditions on aid to North Carolina (which voted for him in 2016, 2020 and 2024). He immediately added, “In California I have a condition.

” Two, in fact: A state voter ID law. And, of course, “release the water.” “After that,” said the ever-transactional president, “I will be the greatest president that California has ever seen.

” (Apparently Trump has dropped his idea of also conditioning aid on Congress extending the federal debt limit. Opposition from far-right Republicans made that ploy a nonstarter.) Trump’s willingness to exploit disaster aid for political points shouldn’t be surprising.

During his first term he slowed aid over several years to Democratic-friendly Puerto Rico , which was all but destroyed by hurricanes, even as his administration sped it to red states Florida, Missouri and Texas, according to an investigation by the then-inspector general of Housing and Urban Development. And he resisted aid to California after the 2018 wildfires until an advisor showed him that ravaged Orange County had more Trump voters than all of Iowa. Before the 2024 election, Newsom called that 2018 experience “a glimpse into the future if we elect” Trump.

The future is here. @jackiekcalmes.