If you want to know why 56% of voters view the Democratic Party unfavorably while President Donald Trump is enjoying record-high approval ratings, just watch the video of the meeting Trump had with Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass and Rep. Brad Sherman (D-CA) after he met with property owners whose homes were destroyed in the Palisades Fire.
Surrounded by the press and irate residents already frustrated by delays, Trump pressed Bass to make sure the recovery would begin swiftly. “I don’t want to be the only one to give permits like Day One and then find out that the cities, the towns, and the state are not going to give you permits because, you know the problem with permits, it only takes one.”
Bass claimed she was already doing “everything” she could to slash regulations, adding that the “No. 1 thing that we are going to do immediately … is to clear out the debris.” When Trump said people should be allowed to clean their own debris so they wouldn’t have to wait for the city to take months to hire a contractor, Bass responded, “If individuals want to clear out their property, they can.”
The audience was having none of it. “We can’t even get to our house,” one woman shouted while another man said he wanted to clean his lot today but was told by the city he couldn’t.
Bass then backtracked and admitted people were not allowed to clean their property now but should be able to soon: “We think within a week.”
“That’s a long time, a week,” Trump responded. “I’ll be honest, to me, everyone standing in front of their house, they want to go to work and they’re not allowed to do it.”
“I know that guy right there that’s talking,” Trump continued, pointing to a man in the crowd. “I know my people. You’ll be on that thing tonight throwing the stuff away, and your site … will look perfect within 24 hours, and that’s what he wants to do. He doesn’t want to wait around for seven months until the city hires some demolition contract that’s going to charge him $25,000 to do his lot,” he said before turning to address Bass. “You have emergency powers just like I do, and I’m exercising my emergency powers. You have to exercise yours.”
Trump couldn’t have looked more empathetic and bold. Bass couldn’t have looked weaker or more out of touch.
Just minutes later, Sherman pressed Trump for a federal bailout of California, noting that most residents would only be getting $43,000 from the federal government to rebuild their homes. Trump pushed back.
“Well, you know, you did something, Brad, every insurance company in the country left California,” Trump said. “That’s why you have no insurance because you made it so impossible. People that think like you made it so impossible.”
And while it is true that not every insurance company has left the entirety of California, Trump is absolutely correct. Thanks to misguided regulation passed by Democrats such as Sherman, every insurance company has abandoned specific areas of California, including many in Southern California such as the Pacific Palisades.
California has the strictest insurance regulations in the country, including a state insurance commissioner empowered to freeze insurance premiums and deny premium price hikes. When insurance companies are not allowed to price the risk of selling insurance policies in fire-prone areas properly, many choose not to sell policies at all. Left with whole neighborhoods where no one is willing to sell insurance under Democratic price controls, the state stepped in as an insurer of last resort.
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That state-created insurance pool, the California FAIR Plan Association, insures almost half a million homes in the state, each of which pays premiums into the pool. As of January, FAIR had just $377 million in assets to cover possible fire claims. The damage from the Pacific Palisades fire alone is over $4 billion. There is no justification for federal taxpayers to pick up the tab for a problem entirely created by Sherman, Bass, and the Democratic Party of California — at least not until California Democrats agree to significant preconditions.
Trump’s brash optimism is exactly what Los Angeles needs to recover from these recent fires. It is exactly what the entire state of California needs to recover from decades of Democratic Party rule. For too long, California has become a state where citizens are too afraid to build anything, lest the California Coastal Commission or one of the state’s other 239 agencies shut them down. The state itself can’t even lay a mile of high-speed rail track after spending $10 billion in more than 10 years. If Californians want to keep electing Democrats to lead them, that’s fine. Just don’t expect the rest of us to pay for their mistakes.