Letters from an American - January 8, 2025

Episode Date: January 9, 2025

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January 8, 2024. At least four wildfires tearing across Los Angeles have killed at least five people and forced the evacuation of at least 130,000 more and have flattened about 42 square miles or 109 square kilometers. The fires are being driven by unusually high winds with gusts of up to 98 miles per hour, which is 158 kilometers per hour. Although January is typically part of California's wet season, conditions are terribly dry. Downtown Los Angeles has received just 0.16 inches or 0.4 centimeters of rain since May 6, 2024, and the summer was unusually hot. President Joe Biden is supporting state and local responses to the fire with federal resources. Today he approved a major disaster declaration,

which enables people in towns to access funds immediately in order to jumpstart their recovery. The Federal Emergency Management Agency, or FEMA, will reimburse California for some of the costs of fighting the fires. Five U.S. Forest Service large air tankers and 10 federal firefighting helicopters have been deployed to support the local firefighters. Ten Navy helicopters with water delivery buckets are joining them. California Governor Gavin Newsom has deployed the California National Guard, and the Nevada National Guard is standing by. Canada, too, has sent water-dropping helicopters and a pair of planes, which are part of a firefighting contract with California

that's been in place for 14 years. At a fire station in Santa Monica, Biden stood beside Newsom and said, we're prepared to do anything and everything for as long as it takes to contain these fires. In contrast to federal support for California under Biden, in the midst of the ongoing crisis, President-elect Donald Trump blamed California Governor Gavin Newscombe and his Los Angeles crew for the fires, suggesting he had put the needs of fish over the people of California. He posted, Governor Gavin Newscombe refused to sign the water restoration declaration put before him that would have allowed millions of gallons of

water from excess rain and snowmelt 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. and making sure firefighters have all the resources they need. Trump is apparently claiming that water that could be used to fight the fires

has been diverted to protect the endangered Delta smelt. But the water systems in California are complicated, and importing water from Northern California would make no difference for the wildfires. Los Angeles water doesn't come from Northern California. It comes from an aqueduct east of the Sierra Nevada from groundwater and from the Colorado River. Right now the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California has more water stored than it has ever had before, according to Mark Gold, a board

member. It's not a matter of having enough water coming from Northern California to put out a fire, he told Alastair Bland of CalMatters. It's not a matter of having enough water coming from Northern California to put out a fire, he told Alastair Bland of CalMatters. It's about the continued devastating impacts of a changing climate. 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. The two different responses of the current president and the incoming one revealed dramatically different approaches to the presidency.

Yesterday, the Biden administration announced the finalization of a new rule that will remove medical debt from all credit reports. Until now, medical debt has meant that consumers could be denied mortgages, car loans, or small business loans. In addition, Vice President Kamala Harris announced that funds from the American Rescue Plan, passed by Democrats shortly after Biden took office in 2021, have enabled the elimination of more than $1 billion in medical debt for 700,000 Americans. Jurisdictions are on track to eliminate about $15 billion in medical debt for nearly 6 million

Americans, the White House said. No one should be denied economic opportunity because they got sick or experienced a medical emergency, Harris said. While Biden and Harris are working to solve problems for regular Americans, Trump has simply gone on the offensive, attacking Democrats for what he claims is their mismanagement without offering any ideas of his own. No water in the fire hydrants, no money in FEMA, he posted. This is what Joe Biden is leaving me. Thanks Joe. By now we know that Trump goes on offense to hide his own

shortcomings. As Judd Langham of Public Notice pointed out, the largest wildfire in California history, the August Complex fire, which burned more than 1 million acres, occurred during the Trump administration. That pattern of going on offense to hide his own behavior was also on display today when CNN's Hattis Gold reported that someone inside the Fox News Channel or FNC gave the Trump team the questions that Trump would be asked at an Iowa town hall last January just before the Iowa caucus. A forthcoming book by Alex Eisenstadt of Politico details the close

relationship between Trump and people within FNC. It says that after Trump refused to prepare for that town hall, someone inside Fox texted the questions to a senior Trump aide, enabling them to prep him with answers. After Trump fell apart during his debate with Vice President Harris, he accused her of knowing the questions ahead of time and said the debate was rigged. Trump apparently went on the offensive yesterday when he called Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito, just hours before Trump's lawyers filed an emergency request with the court, asking it to stop Manhattan Judge Juan Marchand from sentencing Trump Friday in the election interference case in which a jury found him guilty of 34 felonies. Alito told reporters that they talked only about a job opportunity for one of Alito's law clerks and did not discuss the case, but it is highly unusual for a president or president-elect to talk with a Supreme Court justice when

that official has business before the court. CNN's Caitlin Collins said such a thing was almost unheard of. As legal analyst Quinta Jurajchik observed, though, someone leaked news of this inappropriate contact astonishingly quickly. Such news usually has taken a while to dribble out, Jurejczyk noted, but this happened this morning. Somebody was smug or pissed off enough to go to the press right away. Trump's accusations that Biden committed a crime more likely to be chalked up to Trump himself,

taking bribes from a foreign company, was also in the news today. Alexander Smirnov, the key witness for the House Republicans investigation into Biden, was sentenced to six years in prison after pleading guilty to lying to the FBI about the alleged bribery and to tax evasion. Julia Ainsley and Carol E. Lee of NBC News today reported another way in which Trump is threatening to go on offense, by conducting a very visible raid targeting undocumented immigrants in the Washington, DC area

as soon as he takes office. While presidents Barack Obama and Biden have targeted employers who violate labor laws, Trump wants to demonstrate shock and awe by raiding workplaces and sweeping up migrants who are in the US without documentation, regardless of their criminal status. His transition team has been talking with US Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE, officials about the logistics of such raids.

And then of course, there are Trump's frequent references to taking over other countries. Don Jr. traveled to Greenland this week with right-wing activist and media personality Charlie Kirk, ostensibly to record a podcast, but Trump Sr. followed the trip with posts saying, make Greenland great again. That idea is getting traction among MAGA leaders even though, or perhaps because, it is a direct affront to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, or NATO, to which both the U.S. and Denmark belong. Over the New York Post's map of the Don Roe Doctrine, in which Canada is labeled 51st state,

Greenland is labeled our land, the Gulf of Mexico is labeled Gulf of America. And the Panama Canal is labeled Panama Canal. The Republican majority on the House Foreign Affairs Committee posted today, our country was built by warriors and explorers. We tamed the West, won two world wars, and we're the first to plant our flag on the moon. President Trump has the biggest dreams for America and it's un-American to be afraid of big dreams.

Journalist Jamie Dupree screenshotted the tweet before the committee deleted it. Behind all the offense though, things that matter deeply to the American people are going largely unnoticed. MAGA representatives have been introducing a slew of measures to the new Congress, many of which incorporate the plans of Project 2025 into legislation. They call for turning over immigration to the states, privatizing veterans' health care, and repealing the 1993 National Voter Registration Act, the 2010 Affordable Care Act, and the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act. Bills call for withdrawing the U.S. from the World Health Organization, increasing oil and gas production on federal lands,

abolishing the Internal Revenue Service, or IRS, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives, or ATF, and the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, OSHA, allowing states to spend federal education money on private school vouchers and removing the protection of transgender rights from schools. Other measures would revoke security clearances for certain former members of the intelligence community, introduce a constitutional amendment to cap the Supreme Court at nine justices, and cut off federal funding

to the Manhattan District Attorney's Office, the office that successfully charged Trump with election interference, and the Fulton County, Georgia District Attorney's Office, the office that has charged Trump with criminal conspiracy. And Magan Republicans have proposed a bill to impose a national abortion ban, along with a bill urging Congress to support a consortium of anti-abortion doctors for women because, the bill says, health care should emphasize the whole woman, including her physical, mental, and spiritual wellness.

And health care for women should also address the needs of men, families, and communities. Letters from an American was produced at Soundscape Productions, Dedham, Massachusetts. Recorded with music composed by Michael Moss.