As Los Angeles burns, Trump and California governor lock horns over aid

Contributing sentiments towards policy:

59% : "We will protect California against the flood of disinformation and assaults on our shared values, and work cooperatively with President Trump wherever possible," Salladay, his senior aide, said.
56% : Brown told a television interviewer recently that his interactions with Trump had been "very limited but very positive".
51% : The governor's staff now say Trump has accepted the invitation, but it is not clear when he will be coming.
48% : "It's not hard to do both - the governor and President Trump did exactly that in 2019 and 2020, particularly during the pandemic.
48% : "I'm hopeful they [Newsom and Trump] are going to rise above it and do the right thing."
47% : "Many political and private-sector leaders have chosen to tread carefully around Trump, given his fondness for lashing out against perceived enemies and the power he wields with Republican majorities in both the Senate and the House of Representatives.
47% : "Three days into the fires, before Trump took the oath of office, Newsom invited him to visit the scenes of devastation in Pacific Palisades and Altadena, offering "an open hand".
42% : "It looked like our country was just helpless," Trump told Sean Hannity from the Oval Office.
42% : "It was clear that Trump was entirely self-interested and vengeful towards those he perceived didn't vote for him," the former senior counsel at the Department of Homeland Security, Kevin Carroll, told the Guardian shortly before last November's presidential election.
41% : Trump and his congressional allies see this not as an obligation, however, but as a political opportunity.
40% : Where many presidents in the past, regardless of party, have offered unconditional support and unlocked large sums of federal aid to help neighborhoods devastated by the fires to recover and rebuild, Trump appears unable to forget that he is a Republican and Newsom the outspoken Democratic leader of the most populous state in the union.
38% : "I don't think we should give California anything until they let water flow down from the north to the south," Trump said in his Fox News interview, a talking point that has been repeatedly debunked.
35% : It has since emerged that Trump was reluctant to grant disaster relief to California at the time until he learned that most voters in Paradise were supporters of his.
31% : Former aides have reported that Trump politicized disaster aid on numerous occasions during his first term, favoring states and regions that voted for him and offering help only reluctantly to areas that did not.
29% : "These problems are bigger than politics," Rick Caruso, a billionaire developer, like Trump, who ran for mayor of LA as the conservative candidate in 2022, said in an interview with TMZ.
24% : A 2021 report showed that $20bn in federal funds were held up after Trump told White House staff that he did not want a single dollar going to Puerto Rico.
22% : Newsom's predecessor as governor, Jerry Brown, took a noticeably more low-key approach in 2018 when Trump was last president and California was hit by two major wildfires, one in the remote town of Paradise and the other in the hills above Malibu.
21% : Newsom, by contrast, has relished his role as an outspoken antagonist of Trump's and may have presidential ambitions of his own.
20% : Publicly, at least, he sees no conflict between needing to secure as much federal aid for Los Angeles as possible and maintaining a drumbeat of criticism against Trump.
19% : From the moment the fires erupted on 7 January, Trump hasn't stopped attacking Newsom, accusing him of mismanaging forestry and water policy in his state and threatening conditions on any future federal aid to make him change course.
19% : He has accused Trump of spreading "hurricane-force winds of mis- and disinformation" and urged him not to politicize the fires when both parties should be working together.
8% : In his first interview on Fox News on Wednesday since taking office, Trump lumped Newsom in with the "radical left", said he looked "like an idiot" on immigration policy and repeated his much-aired, inaccurate accusation that the main reason the fires in Los Angeles raged so fiercely was because firefighters had no access to water.
7% : President - and Republicans - have tied funds to policy agendas as Gavin Newsom fights for more recovery fundsDays into his new administration, Donald Trump is locked in a wrestling match with a familiar foe, the California governor, Gavin Newsom.

*Our bias meter rating uses data science including sentiment analysis, machine learning and our proprietary algorithm for determining biases in news articles. Bias scores are on a scale of -100% to 100% with higher negative scores being more liberal and higher positive scores being more conservative, and 0% being neutral. The rating is an independent analysis and is not affiliated nor sponsored by the news source or any other organization.