Oscar Murdock, my sainted father, does not wear his heart on his sleeve. At age 92, he is beyond such sentimentality. Instead, every day, he affixes a beer-coaster-sized button to his shirt. It reads: “Trump Was Right.” What I treasure most about that item is its subtlety.
The Palisades, Hurst, and Eaton fires blaze out of control at 1:40 p.m. PT on Jan. 8, 2025 (NASA Earth Observatory)
That pin has been heart-breakingly accurate since Jan. 7. That morning, multiple blazes began ripping through greater Los Angeles, my birthplace. The Palisades Fire (in Malibu, Pacific Palisades, and Topanga Canyon) and the Eaton Fire (Altadena and Pasadena) finally became 100 percent contained — on Friday! For 24 continuous days, these fires forced 200,000 evacuations, leveled these communities, and terrorized the nation.
Chart by Deroy Murdock on Feb. 3, 2025 (Wikipedia)
The Palisades Fire incinerated 23,448 acres and 7,854 structures — mainly single-family homes and businesses. The Eaton Fire engulfed 14,021 acres and 10,491 structures. Include the Hughes, Border 2, Kenneth, and Hurst outbreaks, and just these six conflagrations killed 29, annihilated 18,345 structures, and reduced 56,370 acres to ash. This equals 88 square miles. This land area totals four Manhattan Islands or just more than the 84 square miles of Seattle, Washington.
Before: Jan. 6, 2025 (NASA Earth Observatory)
After: Jan. 14, 2025 (NASA Earth Observatory)
This mayhem’s financial toll? AccuWeather forecasts losses between $250 billion and $275 billion.
Who saw this coming?
Donald J. Trump.
President Trump’s First-term Fire Warnings
Throughout his first term, Trump repeatedly begged California’s Governor Gavin Newsom and other boneheaded Democrats to reduce vegetation and increase water storage and infrastructure, to prevent and, if necessary, defeat the flames. Here are Trump’s relevant remarks through the fall of 2020:
- “There is no reason for these massive, deadly and costly forest fires in California except that forest management is so poor. Billions of dollars are given each year, with so many lives lost, all because of gross mismanagement of the forests. Remedy now, or no more Fed payments!” — Nov. 10, 2018
- “With proper Forest Management, we can stop the devastation constantly going on in California. Get Smart!” — Nov. 11, 2018
- “You gotta get all this cleaned out and protected. You gotta take care of the floors. You know the floors of the forest. Very important. You look at other countries where they do it differently, and it’s a whole different story. I was with the President of Finland, and he said: ‘We have a much different — We’re a forest nation.’ He called it a ‘forest nation.’ And they spend a lot of time on raking and cleaning, and doing things, and they don’t have any problem. And when it is, it’s a very small problem.” — On Nov. 18, 2018, as Trump toured the deadly wildfire devastation in Paradise, California, alongside then-Governor Jerry Brown, and then-Governor-elect Gavin Newsom.
“You gotta get all this cleaned out and protected, you gotta take care of the floors, you know? The floors of the forest very important. (2018)” pic.twitter.com/YcdfgDP8JM
— Trump The People’s President 🇺🇲 ✞🕊 (@Trumppunksnfts) January 8, 2025
- “Billions of dollars are sent to the State of California for Forest fires that, with proper Forest Management, would never happen. Unless they get their act together, which is unlikely, I have ordered FEMA to send no more money. It is a disgraceful situation in lives & money!” — Jan. 9, 2019
- “The Governor of California, @GavinNewsom, has done a terrible job of forest management. I told him from the first day we met that he must ‘clean’ his forest floors regardless of what his bosses, the environmentalists, DEMAND of him. Must also do burns and cut fire stoppers,” Trump wrote via X, then-Twitter. “Every year, as the fire’s [sic] rage & California burns, it is the same thing — and then he comes to the Federal Government for $$$ help. No more. Get your act together Governor. You don’t see close to the level of burn in other states.” Trump concluded: “Also, open up the ridiculously closed water lanes coming down from the North. Don’t pour it out into the Pacific Ocean. Should be done immediately. California desperately needs water, and you can have it now!” — Nov. 3, 2019
- “I see again the forest fires are starting,” Trump told supporters at a Pennsylvania campaign rally. “They’re starting again in California. I said, ‘You gotta clean your floors. You gotta clean your forests.’ There are many, many years of leaves and broken trees, and they’re like, like, so flammable. You touch them, and it goes up.” Trump added: “Maybe we’re just going to have to make them pay for it because they don’t listen to us.” — Aug. 20, 2020
- “When trees fall down after a short period of time, they become very dry — really like a matchstick … and they can explode.” — Sept. 14, 2020, while Trump visited wildfires near Sacramento.
Democrats Didn’t Listen; Californians Paid the Price
If only Newsom and the Golden State’s lead-skulled Democrat leaders had heeded Trump’s advice. Instead, Los Angeles County endured its two costliest, and most structure-devouring infernos in history. As the fires roared, so did Trump:
Eaton fire in California (NASA Earth Observatory)
- “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. He wanted to protect an essentially worthless fish called a smelt, by giving it less water (it didn’t work!), but didn’t care about the people of California. Now the ultimate price is being paid. I will demand that this incompetent governor allow beautiful, clean, fresh water to FLOW INTO CALIFORNIA! He is the blame for this. On top of it all, no water for fire hydrants, not firefighting planes. A true disaster!” — Jan. 8, 2025
- “It’s very sad because I’ve been trying to get Gavin Newsom to allow water to come. You have tremendous water up there. They send it out to the Pacific because they’re trying to protect a tiny, little fish — which is in other areas, by the way — called the smelt. And for the sake of a smelt, they have no water. They have no water in the fire hydrants today in Los Angeles, which is a terrible thing. And we’re going to get that done. It’s gonna finally be done. I got it done from the federal side, and he didn’t want to sign it. But it’s not gonna happen again like that.” — On Jan. 8, 2025, after huddling with Republican U.S. senators on Capitol Hill.
- “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!!!” — Jan. 8, 2025
- “Governor Gavin Newscum should immediately go to Northern California and open up the water main, and let the water flow into his dry, starving, burning State, instead of having it go out into the Pacific Ocean. It ought to be done right now, NO MORE EXCUSES FROM THIS INCOMPETENT GOVERNOR. IT’S ALREADY FAR TOO LATE!” — Jan. 9, 2025
- “To Gavin Newscum: RELEASE THE WATER FROM UP NORTH. MILLIONS OF GALLONS A DAY. WHAT’S TAKING YOU SO LONG. SHOULD HAVE DONE IT EIGHT YEARS AGO, AND YOU WOULD HAVE HAD NO FIRE PROBLEMS TODAY. GROSS INCOMPETENCE!” — Jan. 13, 2025
The Fire This Time: Even Mother Nature Got Burned
By coincidence, I was in California as my hometown became Hades. I flew in on Friday, Jan. 10, from SFO to LAX. I swapped my usual aisle seat for a starboard window. The view was crystalline until we jetted over Santa Clarita. The haze grew thicker from there.
At about 3:00 p.m., on the final approach, I stared north, toward the Hollywood Sign. It resembled a volcano hurling orange-to-dark-brown smoke straight into the heavens. That noxious column climbed several thousand feet, smacked into a westward Santa Ana wind, turned 90 degrees sharp, sped toward the ocean, and eventually polluted the Pacific and the atmosphere with tons of charred crap. (RELATED: Apocalypse Now: Behold the Palisades Fire’s Devastating Aftermath)
I felt like a Roman senator peering down on Pompeii.
Those who lose sleep over greenhouse gases should stay wide awake for weeks about the tons of smoke that choked southern California for 24 days. This veritable carbon-dioxide factory surely reversed major CO2 decreases generated by Prius, Rivian, Tesla, and other electric vehicles. Similarly, a UCLA-led study in 2022 concluded that, across California, “wildfire emissions in 2020 essentially negate 18 years of reductions in GHG emissions from other sectors by a factor of two.”
American Dream up in smoke: A suburban white picket fence protects a burned down home in Pacific Palisades, Calif. on Jan. 12, 2025 (Deroy Murdock)
Bad enough, if only natural vegetation had become cinders. However, the air filled with fumes from roasted audio gear, charcoal briquettes, desktop computers, digital devices, Drano, electric-car batteries, fleece jackets, HDTVs, Head & Shoulders, laptops, mattresses, microwave ovens, Mr. Clean, parkas, pool furniture, refrigerators, shower curtains, ski boots, sofas, solar panels, and countless other man-made items stuffed with chemicals.
Frightening volumes of such toxic ash blanket this neo-Dresden. Charred remnants of chlorine pellets, lithium, polyester, vinyl, and other poisons fly with each breeze and race into Pacific-bound storm drains with every rain.
This furnace also cremated countless creatures, despite honest efforts to harden their habitat. In one maddening case, as HBO’s Bill Maher explained, “The power lines that cut through Topanga weren’t upgraded because it endangered an herb, the milkvetch, which sounds like something they serve at Passover.”
This plan would have curbed the “elevated fire risk” in the Palisades-Malibu area by updating wooden electrical poles with steel structures, installing wind and flame-resistant transmission wires, and widening fire lanes.
“This project will help ensure power reliability and safety, while helping reduce wildfire threats,” the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power declared in 2019. “These wooden poles were installed between 1933 and 1955 and are now past their useful service life.”
Unfortunately, eco-freaks halted this initiative when they heard that it threatened the endangered Astragalus brauntonii. The California Coastal Commission forced DWP to scrap this safety effort, replant the shrub, and pay a $2 million fine.
Thanks to these idiots, power poles installed the year that Adolf Hitler became Reichskanzler stayed put. Antique electrical lines crackled along, and that fire road remained narrow.
What could go wrong?
“That work saved about 200 Braunton’s milkvetch plants,” wrote the New York Post’s Alex Oliveira, “almost all of which have now likely been torched in the wildfires that consumed Topanga Canyon, along with nearly 24,000 acres (37 square miles) of some of L.A.’s most sought-after real estate.”
The rotten news from January’s Hell-on-Earth will unfold for years.
Things would have gone so much better had California’s milkvetch-brained leaders listened to the 45th (now 47th) president of the United States, rather than laughed at him. Once again, and all too tragically milky, Trump was right.
READ MORE from Deroy Murdock:
Can Pete Hegseth Actually Run the Pentagon?
Apocalypse Now: Behold the Palisades Fire’s Devastating Aftermath
Judge’s Ruling Will Help Trump Make the Border Wall Great Again
Deroy Murdock is a Manhattan-based Fox News Contributor.
