On Sunday, speaking on CNN’s State of the Union with host Jake Tapper, Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti accused President Trump of lacking empathy for the fire-stricken victims of California’s fires, saying loftily, “Even if you’re a partisan, you should be stepping up with empathy.”
Vis-à-vis caring and empathy, when Los Angeles experienced record-breaking searing heat last week, and temperatures reached roughly 120 degrees in some parts of the cities, Garcetti, noting the power shortage plaguing the city, suggested that some people use a fan.
Tapper pointed out that Trump had declared California’s fires a disaster three weeks ago, prompting Garcetti to pontificate, “But there’s a refusal to, in a blaming blue states over red states in his mind, I mean, I remind people there’s a million Republicans that live here in the city of Los Angeles. Even if you’re a partisan, you should be stepping up with empathy.”
Garcetti also caterwauled about Trump saying forest mismanagement had contributed to the devastating fires ravaging California, snapping, “Well, I listen to fire professionals, not the president of the United States or a politician, when it comes to actually what causes these fires.”
Then unsurprisingly, he cited climate change as the reason for the fires: “It’s been very clear that years of drought, as we’re seeing. Whether it’s too much water and too much rain in parts of our country right now or too little, this is climate change. And this is an administration that’s put its head in the sand, while we have Democratic and Republican mayors across the country stepping up to do their part.”
Garcetti then turned to insults: “This is an administration, a president who wants to withdraw from the Paris climate accords later this year, the only country in the world to do so. Talk to a firefighter, if you think that climate change isn’t real. And it seems like this administration are the last vestiges of the Flat Earth Society of this generation.”
Garcetti also complained that he would have acted sooner dealing with the coronavirus but was misled by President Trump. Tapper asked, “If you had known in early February what we now President Trump knew, you would have acted sooner?” Garcetti postured, “Unquestionably.”
Tapper stated, “This week, we learned from reporter Bob Woodward that President Trump was aware of the serious threat posed by the coronavirus in early February, even as he repeatedly downplayed it and dismissed it in public. You issued your first stay-at-home order more than a month later, March 19. Do you think, if you had known in early February what we now President Trump knew, you would have acted sooner?”
Garcetti answered, “Unquestionably,” then segued to attacking Trump on various issues, sniping, “And, look, you put it great in the opening. This was a rough week for the president, because he’s failing on the basics, the basics of supporting our troops, the basics of responding to a fire, the basics of managing the worst health pandemic that we have had.”
Then Garcetti returned to attacking Trump over the coronavirus: “We were the first city to close things down, the first city to offer widespread testing. But we had to go it alone. And we heard that consistently. That’s up to the states. That’s up to the local governments. I had firefighters providing tests to people, volunteers who would give their time because we had no leadership at the national level.”
“And, yes, if we had known and had leadership that didn’t say, calm, but actually allowed us to do the work and provided us the resources to do so, we would have taken action much earlier, and thousands of lives in my city and, obviously, maybe tens of thousands, if not 100,000 lives in America could have been saved,” he added.