Jeanine Pirro raged against California Gov. Gavin Newsom on Monday, blaming his “feckless leadership” for making the historic Los Angeles wildfires worse.
“You know, I never realized that I lived in a Third-World country, that I lived in a country where this kind of thing would happen in the United States and we wouldn’t be able to at least fight back as well as we should have been able to fight back,” the Fox News host said on Monday’s “The Five.”
Pirro previously referred to the U.S. as a “Third-World country” after President-elect Donald Trump was found guilty on 34 felony counts in his hush money case in May 2024.
Watch Monday’s segment via Fox News below:
She added that the fires, which were fueled by unusually fierce Santa Ana winds that posed an almost insurmountable challenge to combat, were “a predicted disaster.”
Pirro added, “I’ve never been more convinced that Gavin Newsom is nothing more than an empty suit.”
Responding to Newsom’s comment that Trump hasn’t returned his calls to discuss the ongoing wildfire emergency, Pirro said, “He’s looking to place blame on everybody else. He’s looking to criticize Donald Trump.”
She suggested that President Joe Biden tour the area instead — but Biden was actually in Los Angeles when the first and most devastating fire broke out in the Pacific Palisades. He had to cancel plans to announce two new national monuments in the state. Last week, Biden approved Newsom’s declaring a state emergency.
Pirro also blamed “environmentalists” who wouldn’t let Trump move water from Northern California to Southern California in 2019 because they were “worried about the smelts.”
She seemed to be referring to the “water restoration declaration” Trump wrote about on Truth Social on Jan 8., which he said Newsom refused to sign. “That would have allowed millions of gallons of water, from excess rain and snow melt from the North, to flow daily into many parts of California, including the areas that are currently burning in a virtually apocalyptic way,” Trump said.
Newsom’s press team, meanwhile, responded on X to say, “There is no such document as the water restoration declaration – that is pure fiction.”
The California governor has raised concerns that Trump might withhold federal funds from the state for political reasons. “He did it to California back before I was even governor, in 2018, until he found out folks in Orange County voted for him and he decided to give them money,” Newsom said in an interview with NBC News that aired Sunday, citing comments by former Trump advisor Mark Harvey.
Back in 2018, Trump’s suggestion to fight wildfires was to “rake” the forests, as, he said, they do in Finland. The forestry director of the Finnish Forest Association, Heikki Savolainen, told the BBC at the time, “Those statements were very interesting. I see raking only in my own yard. It belongs to yards and parks.”
