A delusional Emperor Trump fiddles while LA burns

Wide-ranging was a word that you heard on NPR and CNN Tuesday as the U.S. media yet again struggled to furiously scrub some soap of sanity onto a dangerously unfiltered hour and a half of President-elect Donald Trump speaking from his Mar-a-Lago mansion, which provided America a kind of trailer for the horror show that opens wide on Jan. 20.

But even after a 2024 campaign that devolved into a Pavarotti dance party and a 12-minute monologue about Arnold Palmer’s private parts, it was really hard for TV talking heads to “sanewash” this one. The man who’ll place his right hand on a Bible in 11 days, laid out a fever dream of an American empire that could send troops into the jungles of Panama and atop glaciers in Greenland while bullying our erstwhile Canadian friends into economic submission and erasing the Gulf of Mexico to write in “Gulf of America” with a Sharpie on his madman’s map.

It was hard to decide whether it is scarier for America if the 47th president-to-be was serious or joking or just setting up his next con job with his imperial bluster, wrapped as it was in wackadoodle rants about underperforming dishwashers, itches that Trump blamed on electric heaters, and offshore wind turbines that he accused, contrary as always to the known facts, of assassinating whales.

Even after everything America has been through in nearly a decade since Trump descended from Trump Tower on his golden escalator, this was an interlude of insanity that only lacked an announcement that Caligula’s horse will serve as White House counsel, or that future Attorney General Pam Bondi will investigate the theft of a pint of missing strawberries. It screamed for a 5-year-old pundit to tell America they’d just seen our future emperor standing at a podium buck naked.

But there was another layer of dangerous reality buried beneath this raving strongman’s calls for American lebensraum. While the punditocracy pregamed a possible U.S.-Denmark unfriendly match, Trump also made clear the most dangerous part of his real agenda that almost certainly will 100% happen between now and January 2029: an America soaking in fossil fuels that seeks to ban wind power while mainlining its fracked gas straight into your oven. The president-elect vowed on Tuesday to overturn President Joe Biden’s new curbs on offshore oil drilling, declaring: “I will reverse it immediately. And we will drill, baby, drill.”

What could possibly go wrong?

Just a matter of seconds after Trump finally relinquished his Mar-a-Lago podium, at 10:30 a.m. West Coast time, some 2,330 miles west near North Piedra Morada Drive in the steep oceanside Los Angeles enclave of Pacific Palisades, the first spark exploded.

As I write this roughly 40 hours later, five Angelinos are known dead in the 2025 California wildfires. That number is all but certain to rise when first responders can finally work their way through the rubble of more than 2,000 homes and businesses (so far) burned to the ground by a half-dozen uncontained blazes fanned by Santa Ana mountain winds that neared a peak of 100 mph, and the luxury cars abandoned in the middle of clogged roads as motorists ran for their lives.

Neither the shocking statistics — the 130,000 people in the second-largest U.S. city told to immediately flee their homes, the scores of injuries, the massive power outages or school closings — nor the around-the-clock bright-orange TV images of fully engulfed homes in once-vibrant neighborhoods that now look like 1945 Dresden, as the iconic LA skyline vanishes under black smoke, fully captured the complete horror of this week’s wildfires.

The psychic trauma these flames are inflicting on the capital of America’s Hollywood cultural and Olympic glory will leave permanent scars on Los Angeles. Today should be a kind of Sept. 12, 2001, moment for the nation, a day of shared mourning and even, dare one say it, unity. Instead, the spirit of Trump’s deranged Mar-a-Lago diatribes segued straight into the warped reactions of a nation as divided as the buckled pavement of the Pacific Coast Highway.

It felt weirdly fitting that the mic was barely audible when our “adulting” president-for-11-more-days, Biden — coincidentally in Los Angeles for the birth of his first great-grandchild — showed up at a Santa Monica firehouse to voice support for grime-covered first responders, pledge federal aid, and express the nation’s empathy for the dead and the displaced. That’s because the 49.8% of America responsible for Biden’s replacement had other ideas about California’s heartbreak.

It’s difficult to say which has been worse: the race by half-trillionaire copresident Elon Musk, Fox News hosts, and their sycophants to look at LA’s female mayor and fire chief and blame “DEI,” the racists on Musk’s X who celebrated the burning of a Jewish temple with antisemitic glee, or the daylong orgy of hate-filled, narcissistic, liberal-attacking tweets from your next president, who — with a blatant lie about water management — attacked the California governor he calls “Gavin Newscum” and Biden without a thought of consoling a city wracked by grief.

As he barreled headlong from his Greenland fever dreams into his hate-filled rejection of any notion that an American president can or should be a consoler-in-chief, Trump heralded his arrival less as the powerful “red Caesar” sought by “thought leaders” of the extreme right, and more as an American Nero for the 21st century.

He is playing his bitter grievance symphony on his (apocryphal) fiddle while our Rome-by-the-Pacific burns in the Great Fire, and — very much as the cruel, ineffectual, and yet all-powerful Nero did in 64 C.E. — is thrilled to blame the carnage on his enemies (which — irony alert — for the ancient Roman ruler was the brand-new Christianity).

But the most important thing about Trump’s imperial concerto of rage is the art of distraction. I honestly don’t know if POTUS 47 plans to drop the 101st Airborne on Nuuk during the next four years, but he’s made it clear that America’s second half of the 2020s will be dedicated to tossing the fight against climate change — the root cause of LA’s civic nightmare — down the memory hole.

To be clear, it takes a perfect storm to destroy a great metropolis. The fury of the westward Santa Ana winter winds is timeless. But the bottom line is that January wildfires in Southern California were fueled by decades of humans pumping carbon into the skies over LA’s jammed freeways.

The last three years — the planet’s hottest ever recorded, boosted by man-made global warming — of oven-roaster days have meant a cycle of stronger and moister storms over California that nurtured dense brush, followed by 300 almost completely rain-free days of drought, as Mother Nature crafted the tinderbox that erupted on Tuesday.

“A majority of the largest, deadliest, and most destructive wildfires in state history have all occurred within the past 10 years,“ meteorologist Eric Holthaus noted in a piece for Fast Company. ”The emergence of extreme wintertime wildfires in California presents one of those classic ‘This is climate change’ moments: A specific set of weather conditions are now occurring in such a way to produce the potential for rare disasters to become much more common.”

This is indeed climate change, and it’s appalling that the major TV networks on Tuesday, in their breaking news coverage, gave little or no mention of the climate crisis. The political nightmare that is compounding California’s tragedy is that Trump’s tilting against windmills and electric stoves has guaranteed the world’s second-largest emitter of carbon won’t do one darn thing about this for the next four years.

» READ MORE: Trump would sell your grandkid’s future for $1B | Will Bunch Newsletter

It’s rarely even mentioned that Trump’s 2024 grind toward a second term included his should-have-been-shocking pledge to roll back climate regulations if Big Oil would raise $1 billion to fund his campaign. The target was overly ambitious, but many energy millionaires did open their wallets. And the president-elect has now made clear that more fossil fuels and less clean energy will be his legacy, with or without Greenland.

Lost in the hoopla over Trump’s worst and most bat-guano crazy cabinet picks, like weekend TV host Pete Hegseth to run the Pentagon, is that the president-elect’s less-controversial choices for key energy posts will speed the fiery destruction of our planet.

These include Russell Vought, the Christian nationalist Project 2025 author tapped to head Trump’s Office of Management and Budget (OMB), who’s vowed to weaken and undermine the next mandated National Climate Assessment; the oil field executive Chris Wright, who last year posted to his LinkedIn that “there is no climate crisis,” as his energy secretary; and politico Lee Zeldin, who wants a “radical rollback” of regulations, to head the Environmental Protection Agency.

We don’t yet know if Trump’s Marines will be storming Panama, but it’s a done deal that his bureaucrats will withdraw from the Paris climate accords, again. Although it’s true that market forces have been and may continue to boost clean energy, don’t discount the religious fervor among the right that sees fossil-fuel extraction as God’s greatest handiwork. With little fanfare, the Republicans who run Oklahoma are actually striving to ban clean energy, in what could be a template for Beltway zealots.

This is the perfect storm behind the perfect storm devouring Los Angeles. Trump only truly cares about himself, in his toxically narcissistic ambition to die not in prison for his attempted coup, but with statues as our heroic conqueror of the Great White North.

But he’s also harnessed the shortsighted greed of our Big Oil empire for the juice that returned him to power, and now 3.8 million Angelinos are desperately caught in the crosswinds. The only thing that should infuriate and outrage us more than the sight of desperate Americans fleeing their homes with only their dogs and a few family photos is the dread of what else awaits in the next four years and 11 days.

This is all driven home by one final, enormous irony. The only televised break in the California carnage this week has been for the state funeral proceedings for Jimmy Carter, our 39th president who spent much of his doomed one-term presidency trying to warn America about ending our addiction to fossil fuels, even putting solar heating panels atop the White House. In 1980, Ronald Reagan, backed by the same Big Oil dollars that reelected Trump, ousted Carter and promptly ordered the panels ripped out.

On Tuesday, as Carter lay in state in the U.S. Capitol, the fires fanned by 45 years of “drill, baby, drill” were demolishing the community of Pacific Palisades — where Reagan launched his political career in the 1960s and returned again after his presidency — and terrorizing his former neighbors.

It wasn’t karma or even justice — no one deserves the pain these people are suffering — but it is a reminder that our political choices have life-and-death consequences, especially the most cynical ones. In the face of 100 mph headwinds, we don’t have much time to undo the worst one yet.

» READ MORE: SIGN UP: The Will Bunch Newsletter