Trump Issues Outrageous New Aid Requirement as California Fires Spread
Trump still wants to hold California wildfire disaster aid hostage until the state government capitulates to his personal agenda.
Ahead of a planned trip to the state on Friday, a reporter asked the president very directly if he would “withhold funding to Los Angeles because of its sanctuary city policy.”
“I want to see two things in Los Angeles. Voter ID, so that the people have a chance to vote, and I want to see the water be released and come down into Los Angeles and throughout the state,” Trump responded, ignoring the actual question while adding even more conditions to federal aid. “Those are the two things. After that, I will be the greatest president that California has ever seen.”
Trump went on to ramble about the abject beauty of the California terrain before returning to his thesis.
“I want voter ID for the people of California; they all want it, right now.… People want to have voter identification, you want to have proof of citizenship, ideally you have one-day voting … but I just want voter ID as a start, and I want the water to be released, and they’re gonna get a lot of help from the U.S.”
Voter ID law has nothing to do with the wildfires, or with getting federal assistance to California—it’s just one of many demands Republicans want California to meet before they dole out the funds they’ve been dangling over the state.
When asked moments later about the requirement, Trump seemed to imply that there would be no conditions on aid to North Carolina, which is still recovering from Hurricane Helene. But California was a different story: “In California, I have a condition. We want them to have voter ID,” he reiterated.
On Trump’s desire for the water to “come down into Los Angeles”: The president has repeatedly accused the California state government of refusing to send water from Northern California to fight the fires, saying that they’re ignoring Southern California to protect the delta smelt, a kind of fish.
“Los Angeles has massive amounts of water available to it,” Trump said on Tuesday. “All they have to do is turn the valve, and that’s the valve coming back from and down from the Pacific Northwest, where millions of gallons of water a week and a day, even, in many cases, pours into California, goes all through California down to Los Angeles. And they turned it off.”
It’s nowhere near as simple as he describes it, and there is no “valve.” The hydrants were overworked, not shut off. Nor did the smelt have anything to do with the lack of water to the south—high demand and low pressure did. “There’s literally no real connection between the fires in Southern California and delta smelt protections,” said the Center for Biological Diversity’s John Buse.