The Devil Wind

California Burning

The devastation is like a Jedi mind trick. How can this much destruction be possible. Can I believe my own eyes? Pacific Palisades is gone. Over 130,000 people are displaced. Thousands and thousands of homes and other structures have been reduced to smoke and ash. Those numbers will no doubt grow.

There are devastating pictures. One shows a woman standing in her backyard, silhouetted by the fire raging just over the hill. The loss is incalculable; hard to fathom. The human toll is physical, emotional, and financial.

Fires have always been a fact of life out West, just as hurricanes have plagued the Southeast. But these recent catastrophes are of a new breed. Hurricane Helene took aim at inland North Carolina. The Smokies have seen hurricanes drench their misty mountains, but this is of a new order of magnitude. Similarly, the Palisades have burned before too—but not anything like this. The Santa Ana winds blew at Level 2 hurricane speeds—that’s in excess on 100 MPH.

As of this writing, there were eight major fires in the LA area. A single house fire brings a three-engine response. According to LA’s fire chief, they would have needed 24,000 engines. The entire state of California, he said, doesn’t own that many firetrucks. He went on to remark that it is unreasonable to expect a municipal system to overcome a firestorm of this magnitude. He termed the storm a “Devil Wind.”

FDR said that the presidency is limited in actual power. He said the office was really the moral conscience of the nation. Traditionally, moral leadership has meant consoling, cajoling, and constructing ethical arguments leading to policy. The norm is that it’s about fixing the problem, not fixing the blame. But our President-elect is a blamer, not a guy who gives or shares credit. According to the self-proclaimed “only one who can fix it,” America is a “disaster.” “Consoler-in-Chief” is not a title that fits him.

On CNN, Jon Passantino says: Donald Trump, Elon Musk and right-wing media allies have ignited a political firestorm of their own. In X posts and on Fox News, MAGA world is blaming the wildfire disaster on Democratic policies, attempting to fault diversity initiatives, forest management, water storage, the war in Ukraine, and the protection of endangered fish. The result is a digital layer of soot, dirtying up the online and on-air discourse, and leaving everyone confused about what's true and what's false.

"While it takes time and effort to extinguish flames and dispatch reliable information in favor of the public interest, opportunistic liars need no such time to push their agendas," Nitish Pahwa writes for Mother Jones. In other words, they have a head start. Pahwa says, "This is just how every major climate disaster is going to unfold online from here on out." Over at Cal Matters, Alastair Bland has a helpful fact check of some of the claims saturating social media...

From Heather Cox Richardson we learn that Trump posted: “Governor Gavin Newscum refused to sign the water restoration declaration put before him that would have allowed millions of gallons of water, from excess rain and snow melt from the North, to flow daily into many parts of California, including the areas that are currently burning in a virtually apocalyptic way. Let this stand as a symbol of the gross incompetence and mismanagement of the Biden/Newsom duo,” Trump posted. “January 20th cannot come fast enough!" Newsom’s office responded: “There is no such document as the water restoration declaration—that is pure fiction. The Governor is focused on protecting people, not playing politics, and making sure firefighters have all the resources they need.

“Hydroclimatologist Peter Gleick told Taryn Luna, Liam Dillon, and Alex Wigglesworth of the Los Angeles Times that Trump’s linking of water policy to the raging fires was ‘blatantly false, irresponsible and politically self-serving.’”

And of course, there’s a quid-pro-quo: To help the thousands of Angelenos burned out of their homes, the President-elect is demanding California abandon its water policies. He says the governor chose fish over people by not releasing water from the north. The truth is, SoCal water doesn’t come from NoCal, it comes from a ground water source in the Sierra Nevada, but this is another incident where truth is inconvenient and the fabulosity of the lie is just a political smear. Prepare for four more years of the total politicization of facts in favor of lies.

Our once and future leader did not take this tragic opportunity to console or provide any sort of moral leadership. Instead, he chose to castigate Democratic leaders with unfounded lies, and unrestrained zeal. It’s no wonder he’s never had a dog, or that in the Trump White House, there was never any artistic entertainment in the form of music or dance, a staple in every other administration.

The buck stops anywhere else; just not the Oval Office.

Take that, Harry Truman.

©2025 Jon Sinton