Trump Need to Shut Up & Do His Damn Job

Enough of the blah blah blah, Donald. Get out of the way and stop making peoples' jobs harder than they have to be...

“The fires are still raging in L.A. The incompetent pols have no idea how to put them out. Thousands of magnificent houses are gone, and many more will soon be lost. There is death all over the place. This is one of the worst catastrophes in the history of our Country. They just can’t put out the fires. What’s wrong with them?” – Donald Trump, Truth Social, 1/11/25

Oh Donald, shut the fuck up.

I know that I wrote that we can’t react to every Trump provocation, however that comes with a few caveats, one being that when Trump unfairly denigrates officials who know what they are doing and mindlessly attacks expertise, revealing his deep ignorance, we must speak up. Trump’s actions during the Pandemic taught us that letting his words stand unchallenged results in even more ignorance, irrationality, inaction, and, in some cases, death. And, so:

Politicians do not put out fires. Politicians are not trained to put out fires. They haven’t studied fire science. They do not know strategy in regards to firefighting. They do not operate fire trucks or fire hoses. They don’t know the depth of resources available (or unavailable) to fight different types and strengths of fires. They don’t know the geography or topography of fire prone areas.

And there is a good reason for politicians “have no idea how to put [out fires]”: They aren’t fucking firefighters. Few are the politicians who used to be firefighters. Rare is a politician who knows fire science and those that do know, know enough to let the people who are working alone so that they can deal with the fire they are fighting. After all, these are people for whom fire is as much as an everyday thing as the sunrise, people for whom firefighting is almost as much of a passion as a bucket of fried chicken is to Trump.

Unless a politician has “fire chief” or “brigade captain” or “fire scientist” attached to their name absolutely no one should listen to or want to hear from what Donald Trump, JD Vance, Mike Johnson, Marjorie Taylor Greene, Chuck Schumer, Nancy Pelosi, or Bernie Sanders has to say about wildfires other than “We are sending emergency funding to ______ so that the firefighters there can do their jobs.” That’s it. Got more to say? No, you don’t. Shut up.

We don’t want politicians to spit-ball firefighting! We definitely don’t want politicians pretending to know what they are talking and blabbing on, especially when it relates to a disaster during a disaster. And we very much definitely don’t want politicians encouraging their followers to “research fire science” and, after one viewing of a half-hour video by I-Went-To-High-School-With-Fire-Chief-Jones guy on how fluoride takes the wetness out of water, turning water into fuel, which no one is talking about!!! Again, shut up.

How about this, Donald? We let people who know what they are talking about talk…and you shut up. If you are to speak up, speak up in support of the people on the ground, those doing the hard and dangerous work that you think could be done better by you and your buddies. Or how about this: If you are so damn confident in your abilities to fight fire, go for it. Hop in your private jet, fly to L.A., drop yourself in some overalls, grab a shovel and head to the fire lines. Or, if you think you can handle it, put a hose in your hands, drag it toward the heat, and face the flames. Or, hit a command center in real get-to-work clothes, not the togs pols don in disasters. Head towards that wipe board and map out what is to be done. What’s that? You got nothin’? Okay, then shut the fuck up while we hear from people who have a clue.

A day before Trump posted his dangerous nonsense, the Normal, Illinois Fire Department put a short, helpful explainer on Facebook. It reads:

By now, you have undoubtedly seen the devastation of the wildfires in California this week. It's hard to imagine the situation that they are facing, but this may help put it in perspective.

The last estimate of the Palisades fire shows more than 31.2 square miles completely destroyed. That's 2.40 times the size of the Town of Normal. Here is the outline of the Palisades fire, scaled, and placed over the Town of Normal.

The systems needed to fight a fire on this scale do not exist. No municipal water supply is designed to handle the kind of strain that the firefighting efforts in California are putting on it. When a fire hydrant is opened, it takes a large volume of water out of the system rapidly, which affects the remaining supply and lowers the available pressure elsewhere. Eventually, the pumps that refill the tanks won't be able to keep up with the water that is being pumped out and pressure will drop.

This is an area larger than the corporate limits of the Town of Normal with thousands of structures burning simultaneously. That's what they're fighting with out there... Not to mention the 80+MPH winds creating a firestorm through homes and dry vegetation. Firefighting on the ground is virtually impossible in this scenario, and the aerial tankers (planes and helicopters that drop water and retardant) initially couldn't fly due to the high winds. Remember, this is just one of several major fires burning, too.

There is a plenty of misinformation being spread, so we encourage you to get information from multiple sources and from experts. In a 24-hour news cycle, there is a lot of time to fill, and sometimes there's a LOT of filler and opinions and not a lot of actual facts being shared.

This fire is eight times larger than the Great Chicago Fire. It's a disaster on a scale that is just hard to comprehend. We are thinking of all of the firefighters, and everyone trying to mitigate this disaster, and our sympathies go out to the lives lost, and those that have lost everything.

Note that there is a certain awe in the words above. What these firefighters see when they look at Los Angeles is something unprecedented, something they’ve only read about as a “worst case example” or imagined as a scene in a disaster movie. They see something both horrifying and special, and would never ever try to micromanage what their cohorts in Southern California are trying to combat.

The Normal FD writes that what is happening is “a disaster on a scale that is hard to comprehend.” They put the immensity of the disaster into context. This is not just an urban fire. It is not just a wildfire. It is an urban wildfire, actually several urban wildfires covering an area the size of a major city. We’ve never seen that in the United States.

Normal FD says that on January 10, the Palisades Fire had destroyed 31.2 square miles worth of forest, brush, houses, and other buildings. “That's 2.40 times the size of the Town of Normal.” According to CalFire, as of this writing, the damage has grown to 23,713 acres or 37 square miles (January 13, 2025). More context: Anaheim is 49.8 square miles, San Francisco is 46.9, Boston is 48.4, Buffalo is 40.3, and Miami is 35.8. Newark and Jersey City combined are 38.8 square miles.

Though the Palisades Fire is the biggest of the L.A. wildfires, it is just one of a few. The Eaton Fire has damaged 22 square miles, while the Kenneth, Hurst, Lidia, Sunset, Woodley, and other smaller fires add up to about 15 square miles. Combined that is 74 square miles (47,360 acres) of wildfire in an urban and suburban area that has overtaken what was once rural.

As I explained last time around, the urban/suburban/rural mutation of the hills and valleys that partially make up the greater Los Angeles area make these fires a hellish challenge. Normal wildfires – those that occur in the wild – are fueled almost exclusively by dead trees, dried out brush, and dead grass, spread across land that is difficult to approach, especially when the fire climbs up hills and even more so when it is aided by winds.

Now, take that wild land and fill it full of stacks of wood, paper and plastic, as well as barrels of gasoline and other flammable liquids. Every house and outbuilding grow the fire. Every car is a fire bomb. Areas that were once only brush, that could be turned into firebreaks, are now little masses of buildings, built close enough together that they serve as fire paths to areas that have long been built out, the shells of suburbs that you see in many photographs of the disaster.

For wildfires, individually or combined, the L.A. fires are small. But small does not mean little damage or no loss of life. The Griffith Park (46 acres, L.A., 1933), Tunnel (1600 acres, Alameda, 1991), and Tubbs (36,000 acres, Napa, 2017) are three of the top six deadliest wildfires in California history, all smaller than the 2025 L.A. fires. With 24 deaths, the L.A. fires would be fourth on that list.

Four of the ten most destructive (read expensive) California wildfires hit 76 thousand acres or less, disasters that include the Tubbs and Tunnel fires. Given where the L.A. fires are burning and what neighborhoods they’ve decimated, it’s a no-chance bet that these fires will top the “most destructive” list.

What we are seeing and experiencing now has precedent, outside of wildfires. We’ve seen something similar with Hurricanes Sandy, Katrina, and Harvey (a Trump failure). This is close to Fukushima without the radiation, though who knows how much toxic shit results from and/or is uncovered by these fires. This is the kind of mass damage you see when a volcano erupts next to a village or when an earthquake shakes a city that lacks building codes. We look in awe at what is happening because what is happening is awesome in the scariest sense of the word.

Our awe should elicit compassion and concern, not petty politics and mockery. We should be rushing to help and not blame people. That is as true for us as individual citizens as it is for elected officials, the people we chose to respond to disasters with leadership not haranguing, with expertise not bullshit, with delegation not “do your own research,” with responsibility not buck passing.

Just because Donald Trump “refuses to abide by norms” does not mean that he is exempt from doing his fucking job (or keeping quiet while the guy currently in the job is still employed). His job, as president, is to support the people making the hard decisions on the ground, to get them the resources they need, to fulfill requests for things that they ask for, to cheer-lead, to ask some tough questions – behind closed doors, not in the media – to do anything but scream at people from the sidelines and get in people’s way. That’s the job. That’s what we expect of our “leaders.” That’s what Trump must do whether he likes it or not. No exceptions, no outs, no explaining his actions away.

I am not writing as an idealist, but as someone who thinks it is important that people hired for a job do the fucking job. I hire a house painter to doll up my property, not to pull up a lawn chair so he has a comfy place to scream at the guy slapping on paint another house over. I pay the dentist to fix my teeth, not to do “research” that tells me that a sugar-sand mix is tasty, healthy, and great for my chompers. Trump was hired to be president and he needs to do the fucking job, not to his standard – my lord, we know that Trump’s high bar on disasters is failure – not Obama standard – which is quite high, impossibly high for a slug like Trump - but by the low standard that we held fuck-ups like George W. Bush to, which is “You fucked up big time, but, god damn it, you better get it right now.” I’m not expecting that to happen, but I’m also not going to give Trump a pass. Like everyone else, Trump needs to shut up and do his fucking job.