“The hots are getting hotter, the dries are getting drier ... something happened to the plumbing of the world. Climate change is real and exacerbating this.”

That was California Gov. Gavin Newsom responding to Donald Trump, but not last week in Los Angeles when the president came to survey the devastation in Los Angeles. Newsom was speaking in September of 2020 when wildfires ravaged more than four million acres of the Golden State.

“Please remember the words, very simple. Forest management. Please remember that,” Trump told the governor. “When you have years of leaves, dried leaves on the ground, it just sets it up. It’s really a fuel for a fire,” with brush and dead trees functioning “like a matchstick.” That brought a response from Newsom’s natural resources secretary, Wade Crowfoot.

“If we ignore that science and sort of put our head in the sand and think it’s all about vegetation management, we’re not going to succeed together protecting Californians,” said Crowfoot, who earned degrees in political science and public policy. Crowfoot, a former cabinet secretary for Gov. Jerry Brown and West Coast director for the Environmental Defense Fund, did not spell out the science of climate change. To qualify as science, the hard data would have to be submitted to others for replication.

In 2021, California wildfires burned 8,834 acres, with 7,490 acres in 2022, followed by another 7,127 acres in 2023. Newsom and Crowfoot did not outline any changes in forest management, or explain how climate change dogma had helped them protect Californians.

As it turned out, May 5, 2024, was the snowiest day of the 2023-24 season, with an accumulation of 26.4 inches. The deep snowcap and plunging temperatures brought no response from Newsom, who in May planned a trip to the “From Climate Crisis to Climate Resistance” conference at the Vatican. According to the Pontifical Academy of Sciences: “The Climate Crisis is upon us. It will get a lot worse over the next few decades as planetary heating shoots past 1.5C by early 2030s.”

Over the long hot summer, Newsom issued no statement about the need to trim the brush and dead trees that act as a matchstick. Donald Trump, who advanced that view, was elected president that fall. In December 2024, a raging brush fire in Malibu forced Barbara Streisand, Cher, Dick Van Dyke, and thousands of others to flee their homes. Newsom issued no warning about the need to clear brush and make sure reservoirs were full and hydrants were in good working order. Neither did Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass.

On Jan. 4, with Santa Ana winds kicking up, Bass flew to Ghana to attend an inauguration. On Jan. 6, Newsom was in the Central Valley attending a track-laying ceremony for California’s vaunted high-speed rail project, a boondoggle for the ages. The fires raged out of control, as a friend of this writer described in an email:

Everything destroyed. Entire neighborhoods vaporized. Worse than a thousand nightmares. Power went out at 7 pm. Complete blackness everywhere. Violent embers flew like piercing rockets. Palm trees exploded like Saturn V. Cyclone winds swirling vortex at 80 mph. Mandatory evacuation, cars abandoned on Sunset Blvd. Everything is obliterated. EVERYTHING!!!!!

Such was the case for Mel Gibson, Jeff Bridges, Anthony Hopkins, and thousands of others. On Jan. 24, President Trump overflew the devastation. “Nobody’s ever probably seen anything like this,” Trump told Newsom. “It’s like you got hit by a bomb.”

Newsom told the president, “We’re going to need your support. We’re going to need your help.” By all indications, the governor had forgotten his quest to “Trump-proof” California. For his part, Trump wants fixes “so it can’t happen again and again,” but embattled Californians have room for doubt.

As Katy Grimes of the California Globe reports, the day before Trump’s visit, state lawmakers approved $2.5 billion in wildfire relief but only after Democrats blocked an additional $1 billion for wildfire prevention. As Assemblyman Al Muratsuchi explained, “We’ve been taking up big issues related to climate action,” he said. “This is all being driven by climate change.”

The Torrance Democrat did not explain the science behind that contention. In a similar style, California legislators did not explain how snowfall and freezing temperatures across the southern states fit with Newsom’s claim that “the hots are getting hotter.”

The recall efforts now in the works for Newsom and Karen Bass do not portend a permanent solution. For decades, fires have raged across California under Democrats and Republicans alike. If climate-change superstition continues to override common-sense fire prevention, the blazes are sure to rage on.