Donald Trump traveled to Los Angeles on Friday to view firsthand the massive damage of the wildfires. But unlike other presidents who might have played nice with local politicians dealing with an unprecedented disaster, Trump let Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass have it with both barrels.
"We are going to do everything we can, slashing regulations, expediting everything so that people can begin the process right away," Bass said during the meeting.
That's not true, as Trump pointed out.
"We know the one thing is they are saying they will not be allowed to start for 18 months," Trump said of the 18-month timeframe.
"That will not be the case," Bass responded. "First, we have to take care, to make sure that there's not that getting rid of the hazardous waste, cleaning things up, so that people can start right away."
"Cleaning things up so people can start right away"? What kind of double talk is that?
Trump wouldn't let her off the hook.
"They want to start now. They want to start removing things and are not allowed to do it now," Trump said.
America's big cities have been in deep trouble for most of this century. Three Democratic clowns are leading New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago, and there's little hope that those cities will experience a turnaround anytime soon. New York's Eric Adams, Chicago's Brandon Johnson, and L.A.s Karen Bass are all seeing their approval ratings tanking despite high hopes when they took office.
One-party politics is killing America's largest cities. It didn't used to be that way in New York and Los Angeles. In the Big Apple, Rudy Giuliani and Mike Bloomberg won five successive elections in the 1990s and early 2000s. During their tenure, crime dropped, the economy boomed, and the city thrived.
In Los Angeles, Republican Richard Riordan served two terms in the 1990s as mayor, lowering crime and taxes, "leaving the city a better place" according to his critics.
City Journal's Steven Malanga asks, "What went wrong?"
Has there been a time in recent memory when the mayors of America’s biggest cities are as collectively unpopular as they are right now? Karen Bass in Los Angeles, Brandon Johnson in Chicago, and Eric Adams in New York are all in their first terms, yet in their short time in office they have squandered so much of the support that got them elected that they now sport disapproval ratings that would have made President Biden blush. Bass and Johnson already face recall efforts, and the leaders of New York’s city council have discussed how they might remove Adams from office amid his legal troubles. Though their circumstances differ, the three mayors are alike in one key respect: they were elected in one-party progressive towns where reform has become increasingly difficult because large groups of citizens vote based on demographic categories like race, ethnicity, or gender, and then discover that they don’t like the results of the policies they chose. What, if anything, will voters learn from these mayors’ failures?
It's not so much a question of which party is in power. The problem is as much the Republicans' fault as the Democrats'.
The Republicans gave up competing in big cities so that now, the only ideas that are debated and voted on in those cities are radical left policies — policies that aren't working and are, in fact, making the problems they claim to be addressing worse.
Add to that a suicidal inability to change, to reform, to do what's necessary, and you have a recipe for total disaster. Rather than admit they could be wrong about illegal aliens, crime, race, or schools, these mayors double down and pretend that things aren't as bad as the media is making them out to be.
The people in those cities have given up, moved out, or sought to benefit from the chaos. It was the same in Russia at the end of Communism. The system got more and more corrupt as people gave up trying to do what was right and simply stuck their hands out to profit from the mess.
Trump got more votes in big blue cities than any modern Republican. Can he help local GOP parties make a comeback and compete with the left in the arena of ideas?
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