Gov. Gavin Newsom came into office in 2018 confronting one of the deadliest and most destructive fires in the state’s history: the Camp fire. Even before he was sworn in, Mr. Newsom accompanied Donald Trump, then the president, and Jerry Brown, then the governor, in inspecting a blaze that killed 85 people and consumed over 153,000 acres around the Butte County town of Paradise.
On Friday, more than six years later, Mr. Newsom will once again greet Mr. Trump as the president comes to Los Angeles to view the aftermath of the latest devastating wildfires that have swept California.
These new fires — in the Pacific Palisades section of Los Angeles and in Altadena — serve as a reminder that Mr. Newsom’s tenure as governor has been defined by catastrophe and crisis, whether natural or man-made: fires, mudslides, atmospheric rivers, the Covid pandemic, the at-times violent protests against police brutality after the murder of George Floyd.
“It’s mind-boggling the number of natural disasters and otherwise he has to deal with,” said Anthony Rendon, who served as speaker of the California Assembly from 2016 to 2023. “It is something that has bracketed — and maybe even defined — his time in office as governor.”
But the challenge of the Palisades and Eaton fires, both in extinguishing them and in overseeing the rebuilding of entire neighborhoods in the most populous county in the nation, may be his greatest test yet.
And it has long-term implications for any political career Mr. Newsom might pursue when his term ends in 2026 (he is barred by law from seeking a third term). He has made no secret of his interest in potentially running for president in 2028, and Democrats say his successes and failures in the months ahead will be central to how he presents himself — and how opponents assail him — should he run.
Already it has put him in the position of battling with Mr. Trump, who, as in the aftermath of the Camp fire, has levied inaccurate claims about California policies. (Mr. Newsom sought to push back on some of the false information, creating a page on his campaign website providing “California Fire Facts.”)
In an interview with Sean Hannity of Fox News on Wednesday, Mr. Trump assailed Mr. Newsom and California for water and forest management policies that he claimed were responsible for the fires, but which state officials and fire experts said had no relevance to the Los Angeles disaster. Mr. Trump threatened to withhold disaster aid from California unless it changed how it manages its water.
“Because it happened in Los Angeles, and because it happened on the level it did, there will be a spotlight on this story for years,” said Adam Mendelsohn, who was a senior adviser to Arnold Schwarzenegger, a former Republican governor who dealt with his own share of catastrophes. “Every misstep will be magnified, and every win will be magnified. If I were working for him, I would see this as an opportunity of a lifetime. These are the events that define leaders.”
The fires have posed new questions for Los Angeles and its leaders as they prepare for what was already going to be a high-profile run of events here, including the World Cup in 2026 and the Super Bowl in 2027. The latest catastrophe has stirred particular concern over whether Los Angeles can manage the twin tasks of rebuilding while hosting the Olympics in 2028.
“The economics of this, the timing with the Olympics, the issues of the new president coming in,” has created a difficult dynamic for Mr. Newsom, said Robert Hertzberg, a former state senator and former Assembly speaker.
Mr. Hertzberg ran down a list of recent governors of the state. “Arnold had a zillion fires,” he said of Mr. Schwarzenegger. “Pete Wilson had a bunch of fires. Gray Davis. But nothing like this.”
The fires over these past two weeks illustrate the extent to which California, hotter and drier than ever, is at the leading edge of states that are grappling with climate change. As Mr. Hertzberg noted, when Edmund G. Brown, Jerry Brown’s father, was governor from 1959 to 1967, California was a whole different state, with a whole different tempo of emergencies. “The day he was inaugurated, he went off and played golf,” Mr. Hertzberg said of the elder Mr. Brown.
Mr. Newsom has been a high-profile presence since the fires first broke out, making regular and often unannounced visits to the sites of both the Palisades fire, which was in the city of Los Angeles, and the Eaton fire, which was in an unincorporated area of Los Angeles County. He has signed executive orders intended to help fight the fire and begin the rebuilding. And he has largely escaped the kind of widespread criticism that another official, Mayor Karen Bass of Los Angeles, has faced over her handling of the fires. Ms. Bass has had to withstand widespread attacks and scrutiny for being overseas when the fires broke out.
On Thursday afternoon, Mr. Newsom was in Pasadena, signing two bills to provide $2.5 billion in state money to support response and recovery efforts in Los Angeles.
“I just got back from the Hughes fire,” Mr. Newsom said, referring to a new brush fire that broke out on Wednesday. He stepped to a lectern wearing jeans and a black parka, standing in front of elected officials who had assembled at a Pasadena school that opened on Thursday for the first time since the fires broke out.
Mr. Newsom finds himself in a politically complicated situation as Mr. Trump comes to California: At once a leader among Democrats pushing back on the policies of the new president, while at the same time saying that he and Mr. Trump — who regularly denigrates Mr. Newsom by referring to him as Gavin Newscum — would work “cooperatively and collaboratively” to address the crisis here.
He said that he thought the Republican-controlled Congress and Mr. Trump would reimburse California for the $2.5 billion that he had just authorized. But at the same time, he assailed Mr. Trump for his “assault on the 14th Amendment,” referring to Mr. Trump’s executive order that seeks to end birthright citizenship, and defended efforts by California to finance legal actions against various Trump policies.
“None of this is personal in any way or shape or form,” Mr. Newsom told reporters. “Some people want to politicize things. That’s not our approach. I have all the expectations and beliefs that we will be reimbursed for those dollars.” He added, “I am here for the long haul to support the president where we can, to defend our values where we must.”
Mr. Newsom said at the news conference that he did not know whether he would be invited to accompany Mr. Trump as he visited parts of the state, but he said that he was going to the airport to greet him upon his arrival. The governor said he had not spoken to Mr. Trump since he left the White House in 2020. He said he had called Mr. Trump after his victory, and again as the fires began, but had not heard back from the president.
These past few decades have been filled with instances in which political leaders’ reputations have risen or fell based on how they responded to catastrophes.
In New York, Rudolph W. Giuliani became known as America’s mayor for how he led his city after the attacks of Sept. 11. Andrew M. Cuomo won national praise, at least initially, as the governor of New York for his daily briefings on the Covid pandemic.
By contrast, George W. Bush faced derision for his tentative response after Hurricane Katrina flooded large swaths of New Orleans in 2005. And Mr. Newsom himself was ridiculed in the midst of the Covid pandemic, after he advised residents to stay home and wear masks but was photographed mask-less attending a crowded birthday dinner for a political adviser at the French Laundry, one of the country’s most expensive restaurants.
For Mr. Newsom and other elected officials in California, the months ahead promise to be fraught and filled with obstacles, at a time when Mr. Newsom is already under attack by Mr. Trump and congressional Republicans.
Longtime opponents of Mr. Newsom who are critical of how the state prepared for and responded to the fire have already started yet another recall effort against him; there have been at least a half-dozen such efforts since he was elected, only one of which made the ballot. That recall attempt, in 2021 in the aftermath of the French Laundry episode, failed, and over 60 percent of Californians voted to keep him in office.
Gray Davis, the former governor and lieutenant governor, said he thought Mr. Newsom had raised his standing in Los Angeles because of the way he responded to the fire. But he added that the ultimate verdict on how Mr. Newsom has fared in this crisis will come years from now, when the shape of the project ahead — rebuilding Los Angeles — becomes clear.
Mr. Davis said in all his years in Los Angeles, he could not recall anything like these past two weeks.
“We have flooding, we have fires, we have mudslides,” said Mr. Davis, who was governor from 1999 to 2003. “But I don’t think there’s anything worse than a wildfire shooting embers. I don’t think there’s anything more terrifying than the fires that have been experienced in the last weeks in Los Angeles.”
Shawn Hubler contributed reporting.
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