President-elect Donald Trump’s victory was fateful in many ways, but its importance has been underscored by the ongoing fires in California. If there is anyone who can rebuild the fire-ravaged areas of our state, it is Donald Trump.
The state and local officials who were supposed to prevent disasters and protect us have lost all public confidence. Moreover, they have no idea how to build anything.
Governor Gavin Newsom has been in office for six years, and hasn’t built any new reservoirs or cleared brush from the forests. He promised to build 3.5 million new homes, but just 1.1 million have received permits since he took office in 2019 — and many of those have not even been built yet.
President Joe Biden happened to be in town when the fires broke out. He flew over the damage in a helicopter and left. His “Inflation Reduction Act” allocated $7.5 billion for electric vehicle charging stations. He built about eight.
Mayor Karen Bass has three years in which to prepare L.A. to host the 2028 Summer Olympics, and the city is nowhere close to ready. Yet she decided it would be a good idea to travel to Africa before an extreme wind event.
The only official who seems to know what he is supposed to be doing is newly-installed District Attorney Nate Hochman, a former Republican, who immediately warned would-be looters that they would be caught and punished.
Los Angeles County has already seen better law enforcement since Hochman took office, helped by the overwhelming passage of Proposition 36, which restores heavier penalties for theft (and which Newsom and his party opposed).
But L.A. needs a builder who knows how to cut through red tape and get things done. That is Donald Trump, and while he has focused thus far on Newsom’s appalling performance, California needs him to focus on the task ahead.
Trump needs to take over the rebuilding process in Los Angeles, and the redesign of California’s policies generally, until state and local elections — two agonizing years away — can bring about the desperately needed changes here.
Our current elected leaders cannot help; they are only in the way.
Trump needs to appoint a team on the ground whom he trusts and who the people of California know that they can rely on to make the right decisions for us.
The best candidate would be businessman and developer Rick Caruso, who saved his Palisades Village Mall by hiring a private firefighting service.
Every other commercial and residential structure in the center of Pacific Palisades was utterly destroyed, but the Palisades Village Mall is not only intact, but seems to have suffered only minor damage.
Caruso ran against Bass in 2022 and lost — though he won the majority of votes in the Pacific Palisades. The mall’s survival is now a symbol of hope: it will be the core around which the Palisades will be rebuilt. But its survival is also a glaring rebuke of the failures of the politicians who failed to protect everything else around it on Sunset Boulevard.
The authority of state governments is crucial to our constitutional system. Yet when state governments cannot function, as in many natural disasters, the federal government has the authority to intervene.
The fires in Los Angeles are more than natural disasters: they are a national security risk. The economy of our nation’s second-largest city could collapse in the aftermath. There could be chaos in the streets if looters and vagrants move into burned areas.
Trump needs to step in, and appoint a “California czar” — first to handle the ongoing crisis, and then to force the state to reinvent its policies.
Everything must change: more water storage, aggressive brush clearance, more careful planning, new emergency management, an overhaul of building regulations, the removal of homeless encampments — the list go on.
The good news: a builder is about to take the oath of office. This is Trump’s moment, and his task.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of The Agenda: What Trump Should Do in His First 100 Days, available for pre-order on Amazon. He is also the author of The Trumpian Virtues: The Lessons and Legacy of Donald Trump’s Presidency, now available on Audible. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.
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