Donald Trump:
"One of the best and most beautiful parts of the United States of America is burning down to the ground. It’s ashes, and Gavin Newscum should resign. This is all his fault!!!"
Good governing is a sales job.
Democrats are getting their asses whipped by Donald Trump.
Forest fires happen, and there is only so much one can do to control them. Every fire site is different, every site's vegetation is different, and high winds can make fires unstoppable. Fires have a life of their own.
Trump was smart and cynical. He jumped on the California fire issue immediately and blamed the fires on a Democratic rival, California Governor Gavin Newsom. Some fire hydrants went dry. Trump blamed it on the failure of California to move water from the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta to the dryer south.
"he [Newsom] wanted to protect an essentially worthless fish, called a smelt."
In fact, neither the smelt issue, nor the removal of dams on the Klamath River to restore salmon, had anything to do with empty hydrants in the fire zones. The fire hydrant system had been sized for block-sized fires, not multi-thousand-acre conflagrations of the kind experienced this week.
Trump is shaping the narrative that California leaders value the environment more than people. The narrative is sticking: Only 30 percent of voters polled by Emerson College approve of Newsom’s handling of the wildfire response; 42 percent disapprove; 28 percent are neutral.
Eventually the fires will go out. Eventually there will be careful review of what happened. We already know some fire apparatus was mispositioned. Dry hurricane-level winds pushed the fire down-hill, the opposite of the way that fires normally move. Most area homes were built with wood, not concrete and steel, because wooden homes do better in earthquakes. People like to live among vegetation -- shade trees and privacy hedges -- so making steep canyon hillsides fire-safe will exacerbate California's already-bad reputation for overregulation. The fix won't be easy.
Maybe Gavin Newsom is simply a victim of events, like a very good college football coach with an 11-0 season whose team then loses the 12th game on national television. People are disappointed. Someone has to take the fall, so the coach gets fired. But notice that Trump did not take the fall for Covid. He immediately created a narrative that we were attacked by China. China created the virus. He called it the "China virus." He wasn't to blame for the million excess American deaths. China was.
Democrats underestimate Trump. The California fires are a catastrophe and Americans wonder whom to blame. Trump supplied us with the target. He is selling the message that environmentalist Democrats cause catastrophic fires. Therefore, the solution is to elect Republicans and ignore climate change. Instead, drill, baby, drill.
What should Democrats do? First, get real about the business they are in. Don't look for a policy wonk to lead the party. Policy matters in a democracy only if people hear and believe the policy serves them. Government is a job in sales.
Second, in the case of the California fires, create a counter narrative. It is probably too late to fix this, but Newsom, L.A. Mayor Karen Bass, and others need to have a target to blame. Blame the people who ignored the rising temperatures that created bigger hurricanes in the Atlantic, 40-inch downpours in Houston, and the fiercer Santa Ana winds in California. Blame the 44 Republicans who voted against HR 10545, the American Relief Act of 2025, which provided funds for construction of shaded fuel breaks on the West Coast. These no-voters included some familiar names, including Rand Paul and John Kennedy in the Senate, Lauren Boebert and Nancy Mace in the House, and multiple legislators from states that received significant disaster relief after hurricanes. Blame the hypocrites who sabotaged California while they expect federal assistance for disasters in their own states.
Americans are going to construct a mental narrative of what went wrong in California. Trump provided an easy answer: Gavin Newsom. If Newsom were the right person to be the Democratic nominee, he would already have created an alternative narrative. He hasn't, and I think it is probably too late for him.
The right Democrat to lead the party should step forward now to tell a persuasive Democratic narrative.
4 comments:
Peter, you say, “Government is a sales job,” but according to the Constitution it’s to “…establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity…”
By fanning the flames of fear, anger and hatred, Republicans succeeded in undermining justice and selling a traitor to the most uniformed electorate in modern American history. They’ve opposed social justice for decades. Rather than seek to help the many fellow Americans suffering from the LA wildfire disaster, they spread stupid lies and threaten to withhold Federal aid. If they had any shame, they’d be ashamed of themselves. Some say that to win elections, democrats need to be more like them. Obviously they do need to work a lot on their messaging, but if being more like them means selling bullshit with a toxic combination of stupidity and craziness, let’s not.
Almost as tragic as the fires themselves is the amount of media time and space that must be spent correcting our president-elect’s malicious, self-serving lies about them. Here is just one, for anybody who still cares about facts:
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/fact-checking-trump-claims-los-angeles-california-wildfires/
Peter, I couldn't agree more strongly than I already do about Governor Newsime.
We have entered an alternate universe where millions of people prefer lies over the truth. Trump lies every time he speaks, yet people believe him. Psychologists and historians will be studying this phenomenon for years. An inspiring messenger would be helpful, but as long as lying and blaming are considered acceptable behavior, even the most powerful messenger would not be effective. Perhaps, as Trump and his dysfunctional and incompetent party proceed toward the chaos that appears to be inevitable, people will grow weary of lies and will seek the truth. If that happens, someone who speaks the truth will have a chance.
Politics has its own laws, kind of like how rocketry has physics. Peter is correct that sales is a big part of it.
The Constitution sets the playing field, but there are many ways the game can go. The Founding Fathers didn’t foresee political parties, for instance, or the filibuster, or that the solution to slavery would be an industrial strength civil war.
Politics isn’t totally rational. Ignoring the irrational components of it is one more way to lose.
Post a Comment