What has Donald Trump said about the LA wildfires and other environmental disasters?
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US President-elect Donald Trump has been criticised after pointing the finger of blame over the LA wildfires tragedy. The returning president, whose second White House stint begins next week, has speculated about several possible causes, while labelling some elected officials “incompetent” as the devastating fires continue to burn.
While hosting Republican governors this week, he hit out at California Governor Gavin Newson and Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass, saying: “I think that Gavin is largely incompetent, and I think the mayor is largely incompetent, and probably both of them are just stone-cold incompetent.”.
Mr Trump has placed the blame on former President Joe Biden, among others, and falsely claimed that the Federal Emergency Management Agency had "no money" to help California despite Congress recently passing a disaster relief supplemental worth $29 billion.
He also has been accused of creating “pure fiction” in another of his claims. Mr Trump accused Gavin Newson of refusing to sign a "water restoration declaration", saying the California governor instead diverted water resources in order to protect an endangered species of Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta fish, called smelt.
Posting on his own social media site, Truth Social, Mr Trump wrote: "He wanted to protect an essentially worthless fish called a smelt, by giving it less water (it didn't work!), but didn't care about the people of California.”. But while there are regulations that limit the amount of water pumped from the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta to protect the species, the governor's office said there was no such declaration, calling the accusation "pure fiction".
