We knew to expect winds. When they came on Tuesday morning, sounding like a tsunami crashing over my family’s home in western Malibu, the utility company shut off our power. We knew the chance of fire was high.
I had arrived home for the holidays in early December, and had already been greeted by the Franklin Fire, which had burned the hills black. Now, when my dad and I went in search of electricity, a great plume of smoke was rising above those burned hills. It cast out over the Pacific, just as it had during the Woolsey Fire that tore through Malibu in 2018. The way the wind was blowing—rattling our car, scattering palm fronds and tumbleweeds across the road—we knew this new fire would probably hit Topanga Canyon, the mountain community where I grew up. Dad decided we needed to get up there and help our former neighbors. People who have lived in this area for decades, as my family has, can get so used to evacuation warnings that they don’t always follow them.
Yesterday, the fires burning around Los Angeles were frightening; overnight they became a terror. A fire this strong, at this time of year, is unusual, an outlier. But it is also familiar, one in a series of fires that, as a seventh-generation Californian, I’ve lived through, or my family has. It has destroyed places that I’ve loved since childhood; it’s not the first fire that’s done so. To some of our friends and neighbors, this fire seemed manageable—until it didn’t. Today, it is, as one friend said, a hell fire.
On the way to Topanga Canyon, Dad and I stopped to watch the fire burn. The flames were coming into a neighborhood where two of my childhood friends grew up, just beyond the Pacific Palisades, where the blaze had started. The way the fire was burning, I couldn’t imagine that the Palisades was still standing. The main road was closed—these winds can dislodge rocks and rain them down on cars—so we took back streets. “You can tell people are emotional from the way they’re driving,” Dad said, after someone whipped around a blind turn. We made it to the house of a friend, another old-timer who, like Dad, had lived through the 1993 fire, the one that got so close, it warped the double-pane glass in my childhood home. He told us he’d be fine, based on the way the wind was blowing, and offered to make us a pot of coffee while he still had power—he’d heard they’d be shutting it off in the next hour. Dad said it looked like the flames had reached the mouth of Topanga Canyon, and our friend promised he’d get ready to evacuate. “But nothing will ever be as bad as ’93,” he said.
When Dad and I got home, our power was still out. The city had issued evacuation warnings in a nearby neighborhood. Should we get ready? A month before, we’d packed up the family photos and the birth certificates for the Franklin Fire, and our house had been fine. Our Malibu neighbor, who stayed behind during the Woolsey Fire, tends not to worry. But the winds were so strong, she thought this one could be worse than all the others.
That night, Dad and I decided to get back in the car, to see how close the fire was. When we managed to open the front door against the wind, we were coated in a fine layer of dust. The houses around us were dark, all their power out. Driving on the highway this time, instead of smoke, we saw flames.
The friend we’d visited that afternoon called us. “I’m on the freeway now,” he said. “I got the hell out of there. We’re toast. I’ve never seen anything like this.”
From a radio broadcast, cutting in and out, we could hear the gist of the damage so far. “Malibu Feed Bin”—where my family would buy dog food and pet the rabbits—gone. “Topanga Ranch Motel”—the bungalows where I’d wait for the school bus—gone. “Reel Inn”—a seafood restaurant where employees would handwrite ocean puns beneath its neon sign—gone. “Cholada Thai”—a high-school standard where my friends and I still gathered—gone. “Wiley’s Bait & Tackle,” a wooden shack opened in 1946, where my brother and I would gross each other out looking at lugworms—gone.
My ancestors came to California before it was even a state; we have lived through decades of Santa Ana winds coming in off the desert and shaking our houses so powerfully, we lose sleep. But my brother and I also used to stand outside our childhood home, our backs to the wind, and toss stones into a nearby canyon, laughing as the Santa Anas carried them farther than we could ever throw. The winds are part of life here, and one that I’ve always, probably foolishly, loved.
Last night, my parents and I kept our phones on in case any emergency notifications came through. This morning, our power was still out. We have loaded the family photos and the birth certificates in the car and are ready to leave if the evacuation notice comes. Even as the fires are still burning, my parents are already talking about how they will handle this all better “next time.” We will get a larger coffee press so that, next time, we can each have two servings when the power goes out. We will get a camp stove so that, next time, when the gas shuts off, we won’t have to boil water on the barbecue.
Mom just told me that one of her friends sent her some new photographs: My childhood home, which she and my Dad built together in Topanga Canyon, may be gone. For now, the fire is still on the other side of Malibu. The wind is still blowing.
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Even as fire turned Santa Monica an apocalyptic shade of orange, hired hands went about their business as if it were just another day on the job. “We gotta pay bills,” said one UPS driver. “It’s not like they’re gonna pay us to stop working and leave.”
Axios co-founders Jim VandeHei and Mike Allen marveled at President-elect Donald Trump’s “ever-expansive power” and the “weak” Democratic opposition he faces as his inauguration approaches in a column published on Thursday.
“President-elect Trump — whose power was immense after his comeback win, enhanced by the coming full Republican control of Congress — has expanded that power substantially in the nine weeks since his victory,” asserted the pair in their lede. “It’s rare, if not unprecedented, for a newly elected leader to have so many world leaders and CEOs shift their policies or posture so blatantly during the transition to curry favor with a new president. Trump will start his presidency with a very loyal GOP Senate and House, a vastly empowered MAGA-friendly media and information ecosystem, businesses scrambling to make amends or further improve cozy relationships, and money flowing fast into his family’s business endeavors.”
VandeHei and Allen went on to argue that “Democratic opposition is weak and largely powerless,” before providing a litany of examples of Trump flexing his muscles, including that “major tech CEOs traveled to meet Trump in person and cut $1 million checks to his inauguration,” and “Meta shifted top personnel and its social media policing policies to match Trump’s interests.”
Nevertheless, they noted that all of this is “raw, transactional power — based in many cases on efforts to curry favor, as opposed to clear-cut inspiration or ideological embrace.”
“It’s easy to offer symbolic gestures in good times,” concluded VandeHei and Allen. “Trump’s true test will come when he has to pick winners and losers — and the losers decide how to react.”
CNN anchor Kasie Hunt brought up President-elect Donald Trump’s followers “urging the killing of Mike Pence” four years ago and contrasted Trump’s character with that of late President Jimmy Carter, which President Joe Biden praised in his eulogy.
Hunt, Wolf Blitzer, Jake Tapper, Kaitlan Collins, Dana Bash, and John King were among the CNN anchors who covered President Carter’s funeral Thursday, a day after Carter’s body lay in state at the Capitol.
At one point during Biden’s speech, he praised Carter for his character and for standing up to “the abuse of power” — a reference that some viewed as an allusion to Trump.
As the service concluded, Blitzer asked Hunt for her impressions of the funeral:
WOLF BLITZER: When you saw this really moving funeral unfold, what was going through your mind?
KASIE HUNT: Yeah, Wolf, you know, for Jimmy Carter and for Joe Biden, in many ways, this is something of a generational conclusion to the way politics used to be done here in in this country.
And just even when you reflected on what it was like to have all of the current living presidents together. It really in many ways underscored that because there are realities around those relationships that haven’t existed in the recent, in American history.
For example, the greeting of Mike Pence by Donald Trump, the first time those two men have been in the same room since, of course, what happened on January 6th, 2021, when there were supporters of Donald Trump’s who were urging the killing of Mike Pence. We’ve never seen a dynamic like that then play out in public in a personal way.
And I was struck by President Biden talking about the character of Jimmy Carter. You know, I think his character is something that a lot of Americans, even if perhaps you didn’t think his presidency went very well or you disagreed with him policy wise, his character was very much on display, especially during the decades of his post-presidency, and became something that was so widely admired.
And to hear President Biden really talk about that, considering how the character of others who are now on the public stage is often talked about, viewed by others.
I thought that that was a remarkable– very generous to Carter, but a sharp contrast that says something about our politics today.
This was not the first meeting since Trump inspired a mob that invaded Capitol grounds chanting for Pence to be hanged because he refused Trump’s demand to go along with a plot to overturn the election as there was a 90-minute meeting days after the attack. The two have not been in the same room since then.
But it was the first such meeting in public, and since investigations revealed Trump approved of the chanting rioters.
Watch above via CNN’s live coverage of President Jimmy Carter’s funeral.
MSNBC’s Katy Tur took an emotional tour through the neighborhood she grew up in on Thursday after the Pacific Palisades fire destroyed much of it.
Tur joined fellow MSNBC anchor Chris Jansing from Pacific Palisades where the destruction from the fire was readily apparent, with entire streets of buildings flattened.
“Now it’s completely gone. What I’m standing in front now is what I think was a barbershop, one I grew up with. This was a barbershop. There was a little jewelry shop, there was a boutique clothing store to the left here. The Chamber of Commerce, which held all of the historical information about this historic town, this very old town, is completely gone,” said Tur, adding she can only hope the town records were “digitized.”
Tur also showed her elementary school, which had been up for over 100 years, now partially destroyed. She noted that an art studio she attended, among other places she had a connection to were entirely gone now, including a Bank of America where Tur said she met her best friend.
“I got to say, Chris, and it breaks my heart to say this, there is not a lot to come back to,” she told Jansing as she stood among the rubble.
Tur also found that her childhood home had been destroyed by the fire. According to officials, thousands of buildings and at least five lives have been claimed by the ongoing fires.
“This was the Starbucks,” Tur said as she showed a building almost completely destroyed. “Okay, it’s a Starbucks, okay, who cares about a Starbucks, but it was one of the first ones the country, it was a big deal when it came here. My mom used to sit on the big leather chairs drinking a cappuccino.”
The neighborhood she toured with her childhood home was so devastated by the fires that she admitted it was hard to even distinguish between the properties.
“You couldn’t tell what you were looking at, you couldn’t tell which house was which,” she said.
Democratic Sen. John Fetterman accepted President-elect Trump’s invitation to visit him at his Mar-a-Lago club, the senator said in a statement provided to ABC News.
