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GELFAND’S WORLD - Trump is at war with everyone except our enemies. As of Sunday, the list included Colombia (newly added) along with Denmark (owner of Greenland), Canada, and Panama. Whether a foreign policy based on anger and lack of judgment can be sustained is yet to be determined, but we are currently engaging in the experiment to test the question.
At the moment, Trump's proclivity for dropping a surprise a day is merely irritating, but at some point, it will become a serious distraction in the international scene. Trump likes to say that before him, the United States was not respected. He has things exactly upside-down. But it becomes increasingly obvious that he has emotional needs that get in the way of normal human interactions. There may be a few MAGA warriors who think that juvenile taunts made against the world's leaders are useful tools in international diplomacy, but normal people don't.
As to Colombia, since when is a sovereign nation obligated to accept a military flight from another country absent a direct treaty obligation? Yet as of now, Colombia is being threatened with reprisals including tariffs. Donald Trump's excuse is the allegation that Colombia intentionally sent criminals to the United States. Considering Trump's usual level of veracity, we can evaluate that without a lot of effort. It's not that Trump is necessarily wrong, but that we don't ordinarily trust anything he says without specific evidence that comes from an independent source.
And that leads us to the press conference that was held here in Los Angeles the other day after Trump's tour of the burned areas. Any of you watch it? Among other things, Trump dusted off his old stories about how Finland does forest maintenance and talked about bringing endless quantities of water from the Pacific northwest and even Canada.
Oh, and he also took credit for getting the Olympics and the World Cup to come here.
There was one thing about Trump's views in the televised press conference -- you know, the meeting that included all those fire chiefs and congressmen and mayors -- that was particularly strange. He insisted that homeowners be given the right to begin rebuilding immediately, without a permitting process. This seems to preclude any cooling off period in which we can try to figure out what lessons we have learned from the Altadena and Palisades fires. Why is this important? There are at least a couple of reasons.
We are beginning to realize that evacuation of large numbers of residents is an inefficient process at best. Under the best of cases, it works marginally, but it usually includes traffic jams and slow-going. The example of cars left behind in the Palisades evacuation -- and bulldozed to the side of the road to allow fire engines to pass -- is just one example of the problem.
We at least ought to think about the design of the roads and about strategies for evacuating people during emergencies before we allow for wholesale rebuilding in the larger burned areas.
Another issue is the question of building standards, particularly building a higher level of fire resistance. The local news media are starting to concentrate on how a few houses survived conditions that left all the houses around them as piles of ash. It would be useful to consider what worked and what didn't work.
It's also necessary to consider the latest information regarding building earthquake resistance. Right now, the codes are designed to keep us alive, but not necessarily to preserve structures. If we can design in earthquake survivability in homes and offices for a few dollars more, we will have achieved much.
None of that came up in Trump's remarks.
An obscure but curious question:
In one of the emergency preparedness kits I was handed over the past few years, there was one item that I found particularly interesting. The idea is that in a fire, we are going to have to leave quickly, and we won't have a lot of time or ability to preserve important documents. So, the idea goes, we are advised to take a Ziploc bag (or the equivalent, and one particularly sturdy bag was provided in the kit) and place copies of important documents inside it. Thus you might include a copy of your passport, driver license, automobile ownership certificate, and even your will -- basically anything and everything that you wouldn't want to lose permanently. Then -- and here is where the idea gets clever -- seal the bag and save it in your freezer.
The idea is that your freezer is more likely to survive through an earthquake and the subsequent fire than just about any other shelf or cabinet in your home.
So now I'm wondering. Looking at those endless television images of burned-out neighborhoods, we see a few remnants of chimneys and porches. Are there any home freezers still in existence? I haven't seen any evidence of any such thing, but the tv images are pretty fuzzy from where I sit. What actually survived in the rubble and ashes will be of interest in the post-fire findings.
There are one or two more conclusions regarding that Trump press conference the other day -- It was pretty pathetic that our local leaders conceded to Trump's demands that there be no delays in allowing people to begin reconstruction of their homes. The dangers of toxic chemicals in the debris? Trump simply shrugged it off. The standard process of obtaining building permits? Everyone agreed that this would not be the case, but our officials seemed a little too eager to dispense with the process entirely. Nevertheless, the mayor was a little too quick to promise that all the homeowners -- now become owners of vacant lots -- could just go right ahead and begin the process of replacing what they had.
What's missing is the opportunity to use what we've learned. Here is what might shield us from the Trump demands: Insurance companies.
Even before the latest round of fires, insurance companies in California were getting awfully twitchy about prospective losses. Since January 2025, we can begin to understand where they are coming from. Come to think of it, the Paradise and Woolsey fires were also wakeup calls. So it's entirely possible that a round of careful study as to what structures survived will lead to limits on what will be insured after the next round of rebuilding. And that is what may protect a future generation of hillside homes from reckless construction and irresponsible development.
Perhaps, while the city is looking at the whole story, it will consider the need to redesign the roads and intersections that would be used in any future evacuations.
And one more thing. It's high time that the authorities confer with our city's residents regarding how such evacuations will occur. Perhaps we can hold a few drills where willing participants can try out the system. Those of us of a certain age will remember when school districts ran drills to prepare us for a nuclear attack. We actually emptied entire school districts. In retrospect, those drills didn't really cover the reality of a nuclear war, but a modern-day drill in which we try to empty a particular hillside community could teach us a few things we desperately need to know.
(Bob Gelfand writes on science, culture, and politics for CityWatch. He can be reached at [email protected].)
