Trump takes helicopter tour of scorched California landscape
BEALE AIR FORCE BASE, Calif. (AP) — President Donald
Trump took a helicopter tour Saturday over the Northern California
landscape scorched by a killer wildfire. A full cover of haze and the
smell of smoke greeted the president upon his arrival at an Air Force
base, as did the governor and his successor.
Trump planned to hear from those leaders about the dire
situation and talk with first responders, and later was expected to
travel several hundred miles south to visit with victims of a recent
country music bar shooting.
“Look forward to being with our brave Firefighters,
First Responders and @FEMA, along with the many brave People of
California. We are with you all the way - God Bless you all!” Trump
tweeted while heading west on Air Force One.
Landing at Beale Air Force Base, he was greeted by Gov.
Jerry Brown and Gov.-elect Gavin Newsom, both Democrats. Trump boarded
Marine One without making public remarks.
“I think that the biggest message and the biggest
takeover will be the president saying, ‘We’re here,’ and thankfully the
president’s got big shoulders, and I think he’s going to go there to
offer them up to people that need somebody to lean on,” White House
press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said on Friday on the Fox News
Channel.
The president, who left Washington early Saturday and
didn’t expect to return to the White House until well past midnight,
planned to get a firsthand look at the devastation from the wildfire
that has destroyed the town of Paradise and heavily damaged the outlying
community of Magalia. At least 71 people have died, and authorities are
trying to locate more than 1,000 people, though not all are believed
missing. More than 5,500 fire personnel were battling the blaze that
covered 228 square miles (590 square kilometers) and was about 50
percent contained, officials said.
Trump also was expected to stop in Southern California,
where a gunman killed a dozen people at the Borderline Bar & Grill
in Thousand Oaks on Nov. 7 before committing suicide.
The White House schedule said Air Force One was to land
at Beale Air Force Base near Sacramento about 12:45 p.m. EST but listed
no specific events until his early Sunday return to Washington.
Trump told reporters at the White House before he left
on the trip that “we’re making two stops.” Sanders, in the Fox News
Channel interview with her father, former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee,
who was filling in for Sean Hannity, spoke of plans for viewing “the
scenes of the horrific wildfires that have ravaged California but also
talking with some of the people and the families that were impacted by
the shooting there not too long ago.”
Trump long has struggled to convey empathy to victims
of national disasters and tragedies. His first reaction to the fires
came in a tweet last week: “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.”
Nature and humans share blame for the wildfires, but
forest management did not play a major role, despite Trump’s claims,
fire scientists say. Nature provides the dangerous winds that have
whipped the fires, and human-caused climate change over the long haul is
killing and drying the shrubs and trees that provide the fuel.
He stuck to that theme in his remarks just before
departing on Saturday when he outlined what he planned to discuss with
Brown and Newsom: “We will be talking about forest management. ... The
one thing is that everybody now knows that this is what we have to be
doing and there’s no question about it. It should have been done many
years ago, but I think everybody’s on the right side.”
Trump, who has long feuded with the political leaders
of heavily Democratic California over issues such as immigration and
voting, also has threatened to withhold federal payments to the state.
After being criticized for his response, Trump has shifted gears,
expressing words of encouragement to first responders and those of
sympathy for hit victims.
“It seems that many more people are missing than anyone
thought even possible,” Trump told reporters in Washington, saying he
looked forward to meeting fire responders and firefighters who have been
“incredibly brave.”
But when he was asked by Fox News in an interview set
to air Sunday whether climate change played a role in the number of
serious fires, he said “maybe it contributes a little bit. The big
problem we have is management.” He added that he was surprised to see
images of firefighters removing dried brush near a fire. “This should
have been all raked out.”
Brown and Newsom said Friday they welcomed the
president’s visit, and “now is a time to pull together for the people of
California.”
Trump takes helicopter tour of scorched California landscape
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