Donald Trump visited fire-ravaged Los Angeles on Friday, his second stop on a national disaster recovery tour that began in North Carolina, where the president vowed to “fundamentally reform” or potentially eliminate the Federal Emergency Management Agency.
The back-to-back tours on opposite coasts underscored the challenges that the new administration will face as it pledges federal assistance to help communities rebuild from major disasters while proposing dramatic changes to the way the federal government responds to those disasters.
“Fema has been a very big disappointment,” the Republican president said in North Carolina, which is still recovering months after Hurricane Helene tore through the state. “It’s very bureaucratic. And it’s very slow.”
Arriving in Los Angeles, the president was greeted on the tarmac by the California governor, Gavin Newsom, a longtime political rival. But the men set aside their differences on Friday, promising to work together to help the city rebuild.
“We’re going to need your support. We’re going to need your help,” Newsom said, after thanking the president for making the visit. “You were there for us during Covid – I don’t forget that – and I have all the expectations that we’ll be able to work together to get this speedy recovery.”
“We want to get it fixed. We want to get the problem fixed,” Trump told reporters after exiting Air Force One. “And there will be some ways. It’s like you got hit by a bomb.”
At a fire briefing with state and local officials, including the Los Angeles mayor, Karen Bass, Trump said he was shocked by the scale of the devastation. He and the first lady, Melania Trump, received an aerial tour and then visited a charred neighborhood in the Pacific Palisades, where he greeted firefighters and spoke to residents who had lost their homes.
“It’s incredible. It’s really an incineration,” Trump said of the firestorms that have killed at least 28 people as firefighters continue to battle multiple blazes in the hills around Los Angeles and Ventura counties. Estimates of the total damage and economic loss from the fires could soar past $250bn, according to a new estimate by AccuWeather.
“We have to work together to get this really worked out,” the president said.
Many Democrats welcomed Trump’s visit, which included an invitation from the governor, though some expressed disappointment that it did not include stops in northern Pasadena and Altadena.
Speaking to reporters earlier in Asheville, where he surveyed the devastation from Hurricane Helene, Trump called Fema “not good” and “a disaster” and suggested the agency was no longer effective at responding to natural emergencies.
“I think we’re going to recommend that Fema go away,” he told reporters.
During a press briefing aboard Air Force One, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said the president planned to sign an executive order that would establish “a council of FEMA advisers to look at the agency and root out the corruption, the incompetence and the bureaucracy”.
Should the order come to be, the new task force reportedly would formalize Trump’s desire to redirect more disaster-management responsibilities and federal funding to state governments – signalling serious intent to potentially reshape the agency’s role in national disaster response.
The tour comes four months after Hurricane Helene devastated Buncombe county, where 42 people were killed and local damage is estimated at over $50bn. Trump received a briefing on recovery efforts and met with affected families during his visit.
Fema, with an annual budget in the tens of billions of dollars and more than 20,000 employees, would need congressional approval to be shuttered.
