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Election campaign instead of wildfires: Donald Trump recently ignored the devastating fires on America’s west coast, because Democrats will win in California anyway, critics say. Now he travels to California.
Donald Trump during an appearance during his weekend trip. Due to the fires, he has now extended the trip one day.
Photo: Andrew Harnik (Keystone)
The president took his time. For two to three weeks, Donald Trump watched from the White House how the west coast burns Truly Helping Affected States: Trump only came up with this idea on Friday when he released money from the federal budget to support local fire departments in California, Oregon, and Washington state.
But the catastrophe is now too big to ignore: more than 30 dead, about two million hectares of burned land, people coughing under a red sky. So Donald Trump has decided to add a day to a Nevada campaign trip and travel to California on Monday.
They better take care of their forests, Trump warns Californians
From a political point of view, this is not a smooth visit. California, the most populous and economically strongest state, is a Democratic stronghold. The leader of the Democrats in the House of Representatives, Nancy Pelosi, is from there, as is Kamala Harris, the Democratic runner-up. California Governor Gavin Newsom is a harsh critic of Trump, and the state’s Democratic Attorney General Xavier Becerra has filed several lawsuits against Trump’s immigration, health and environmental policies.
The president returned the favor with scathing remarks about the homeless problem in many California cities. Above all, however, he refuses to acknowledge the now relatively well-documented connection between global warming, the drought in California, and the increasingly devastating wildfires there. As Governor Newsom speaks of a “climate crisis” related to the wildfires, Trump advises the state to take better care of the forests. Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti recently suspected that Trump’s lack of interest in the current fire disaster had to do primarily with the fact that Californians voted primarily Democrats in the election.
Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden is trying to fill the political void. On Saturday, he issued a statement to express his condolences to the families who lost relatives or homes in the fire. He praised the firefighters. And he wrote that climate change was an “existential and pressing threat.”
This last sentence was intended, at least in part, to appease critics of the party itself. Because Biden’s ideas on climate protection don’t go far enough for the left wing of Democrats. It was no coincidence that left-wing senator Bernie Sanders demanded on Twitter in recent days that it was finally time for the “Green New Deal,” Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s extremely ambitious economic and climate protection program. Biden had expressly refused to support this manifesto in the primary campaign. A few days ago he said he did not want to ban controversial oil and gas fracking.
That’s a sensible position for a candidate looking to win in industrial states like Pennsylvania in November. However, the comment surprised many young left-wing Democrats.
