Earlier, the mayor’s office brought emotional support ponies. The firefighters and police mingled with the White House advance team.
At some point Friday, the president will arrive. He will walk the desolate streets of this once-perfect town. He will express his horror at the wreckage. He will criticize Governor Gavin Newsom for his failed wildfire policy. He will express astonishment that the fire hydrants ran out of water. He will note that Mayor Karen Bass was out of town.
He will thank the first responders and pose for photographs. And then he will leave. And California will be what it was.
Well, no — it will be something less than it was. For me, anyway. For a while.
Dennis Prager — may he soon enjoy a full recovery — once asked me why I still live here. So, too, did Greg Garrison, a conservative radio host in Indiana.
My answer was always the same: it’s so beautiful here, as are the people. Sure, the state and local government are pretty terrible, but there’s the mountain behind me, and the sea in front of me, and they haven’t messed that up — yet.
They sure have, now.
The once-green mountains look like the surface of Mars. The lush hidden waterfalls of the forest are certainly buried under the charcoal limbs of fallen, dead trees.
The ocean rolls mournfully under a layer of soot. When it rains this weekend, there may be landslides on the hills — and the toxic runoff from thousands of burned homes will foul the beaches, making swimming and surfing impossible.
Yes, nature will recover. Years from now.
We are the lucky ones. Our home survived — thanks to my neighbors, the ficus trees that shielded my house from embers, and sheer luck.
But there is almost nothing around us anymore. My children have loved growing up here, in a little small town in the midst of Los Angeles, a place where kids ride bicycles in the streets together, where baseball season never ends.
They want to come back, and one day we will. But even if we could return now, we’d be alone.
And then there is the cost — the losses, plus the cost of rebuilding.
Many of my neighbors lost their fire insurance policies just days before the inferno, thanks to California’s absurd, socialist price caps, which drove private insurers out of the state. It will take billions of dollars to compensate them. And hundreds of billions of dollars to rebuild Palisades — and Altadena, and Malibu, and the other hard-hit communities.
And California doesn’t have the money.
We don’t have the money because we spend on things like free health care for illegal aliens, rather than building new reservoirs, or clearing the brush from forests.
And we spend poorly because we are led by people who think going to presidential inaugurations in Ghana, or vacations in Mexico, is more important than making sure that the city and the state are prepared for extreme weather events. And we re-elect them because … they’re not Trump, or something.
Well, Trump is in charge now. And he will be asked to come up with the cash for California. He should give it to us — but he should demand conditions. No federal aid unless the state completely changes its approach to forestry, water management, and emergency services. No more cash for bullet train boondoggles and illegal aliens. No more of these disasters.
President Trump, we really appreciate the visit. But what we need most after you leave is some tough love.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of The Agenda: What Trump Should Do in His First 100 Days, available for pre-order on Amazon. He is also the author of The Trumpian Virtues: The Lessons and Legacy of Donald Trump’s Presidency, now available on Audible. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.
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