Wildfire Trump

Fire destroys, and fire creates. This is as it's always been, and as it always will be.

Since the 7th of January, 31 separate conflagrations — fueled by extraordinary high winds and built up dry vegetation after a long period of drought — have ignited across one of the most populous areas of the United States. Some of the largest still continue, and yet another one, called the Hughes Fire, just started Wednesday morning.¹

Wildfire is an inevitable and natural process, one which humans long ago learned to accommodate for, work alongside, and even use. The vast destructiveness of flame sweeping across forests and grasslands blackens the soil, accelerating the much slower process of decomposition and leaving behind a deeply fertile land. Sometimes these fires have “just happened,” and sometimes they happened because of us. It’s now believed, for example, that the vast wildfires that created chernozem, the most prized of fertile soils found both in the Ukrainian steppes and the American prairies, were set intentionally by ancient peoples. Likewise, controlled or “cultural” burns² have been used for thousands of years to prevent the possibility of larger, more destructive fires.

By clearing out the accumulation of smaller dry leaves, grasses, and branches, such intentional burns lessen the potential for wildfires to consume the much slower-growing and denser fuels known better by the name trees. Even more wondrous, still, is that many tree species thrive especially because of wildfires. Most known of these is the ancient and massive Sequoia. They, along with their shorter cousins the Lodgepole and the Jack Pines, only readily release the seeds from their cones after extreme heat. Other trees, such as the Manzanita, require the chemical changes occurring during the burning of wood to sprout, while the wily Eucalyptus loves fire so much it produces highly flammable oils to help them on their way. More indirectly, trees like Birch, Alder, Willow — along with scores of other “pioneer” species — spread fastest when the earth has been cleared for their coming. And strangest of all, it is largely on account of wildfires that the Aspen transforms itself from a singular tree to an eerie and enchanting forest of clones.

Though wildfires are clearly crucial to the spread and success of some trees, they are nevertheless deeply destructive. That destruction is perhaps hardest felt by those with the capability to flee them yet the misfortune of not having the chance to do so. By this, I of course mean the hundreds of thousands and even millions of animals, birds, and insects trapped in the intense heat and suffocating air of a wildfire. Burrowers rarely can delve deep enough to hide from the baking surface, while fast runners and fliers nonetheless can find their flights to safety blocked by sudden explosions of flame.

Of all those tragedies, though, we humans understandably mourn deepest the fates of our own species in these conflagrations. Yet, even as journals and television programs report the obituaries of the fires’ victims, it’s the financial costs that create the boldest headlines. Financial institutions like Goldman Sachs and Wells Fargo have already put the cost of insurance claims on destroyed homes and businesses in Southern California at 30 billion dollars, with total estimates for all costs reaching as high as a quarter of a trillion dollars.³

Such figures, while incomprehensible, are served as a signal to gauge the severity of the destruction. That is, at least on an abstract mental level, these numbers tell us how we ought to feel about the event and how serious we should take it, but they hardly suffice to explain the suffering of the people such ciphers attempt to distill. How can one possibly translate the world-ending loss of a home or a life into a financial calculation? Especially in light of the shocking disparities between the rich and poor in the United States, how can a 30 million dollar abstraction assigned to the loss of a second or third home really be on the same scale as the $150,000 calculated for a poor family’s only dwelling?

But hardest of all in these calculations is bearing the double-edged sword of perspective. Los Angeles (and its environs) is perhaps one of the easiest symbols of a way of human existence utterly separated from the realities of natural forces and limits. It is a populous place settled through the logic of capitalist expansion and the urgency of the automobile, renowned for its poor air quality and unsustainable growth yet celebrated for its hyper-obsessions with health and plastic youth. It is both a land of dreams and a manufacturer of unreality, raining Hollywood visions down upon the rest of us while itself often dying of thirst.⁴ Inhabited by both the best and the worst of us, the poorest and the richest, Southern California is all the wonders and tragedies of modern capitalist life in microcosm.

Thus, there was perhaps no better prelude to the beginning of Donald Trump’s presidency than the catastrophic wildfires raging through Southern California. Just as the hopes, dreams, fortunes, plans, and lives of thousands disappeared in smoke, an authoritarian strongman prepared his fiery second coming to power.

No doubt, many already feel as if a wildfire has suddenly swept through their lives, charring their dreams of security and turning an entire order of being to ash. For those understandably panicked many, Trump’s presidency is a catastrophic wildfire from which they fear humanity might never recover.

Especially concerning have been the flurry of executive orders signed in the first few days of his presidency. Many of these have been targeted at ending policies — instituted by the previous president, by bureaucratic fiat, or congressional authority — generally aligned with liberal-progressive social goals.

Regarding these Initial Rescissions, most were related in some way to the application of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) frameworks to government hiring, climate change mitigation, and COVID-related vaccination and health policies. To underline the intended point, the order containing those revocations includes the following directive:

To effectuate the revocations described in section 2 of this order, the heads of each agency shall take immediate steps to end Federal implementation of unlawful and radical DEI ideology.

Other early rescissions and executive orders have included separation of the United States from international governance bodies like the World Health Organization, a clawing back of expansions on variant gender definitions, reversals of recent changes in immigration and asylum policies, and an end to jus soli (birthright citizenship). Taken together, it’s impossible to ignore that the true goal of Trump’s governance seems to be an end to the “left” progressive/neoliberal social order.

Besides, this is exactly how it’s been described in the Project 2025 Playbook — masterminded by the Heritage Foundation — from which Trump seems to be directly taking pages. Tellingly, from the head of that foundation, we also find the wildfire metaphor. Quoting himself in a speech,⁵ Dr. Kevin Roberts said:

In Dawn’s Early Light, I compare this work to a “controlled burn” in one of our great Western forests. This metaphor—applied figuratively, of course, to our agencies and institutions—is instructive. A controlled burn destroys the dangerous deadwood so that the whole forest can flourish. In Washington terms, that means dismantling a few of the most corrupt agencies so that our government works for the American people again, instead of the other way around.

Fundamentally, this work is not anti-government but pro-America. Just as a controlled burn in the forest brings new growth, a controlled burn inside the Deep State will spur a long-overdue economic renaissance: new jobs and business startups, new investment in domestic supply chains, new homes and infrastructure, and rising wages and falling inflation...

Though in those words speaking about “Marxist activists” supposedly heading government agencies, elsewhere Roberts condemns “Uniparty” elites. These elites — both Republicans and Democrats — he claims have “abused” American values and helped create a situation where “too many Americans are addicted to screens, porn, opioids, and gambling” through their “war with all the sources of human flourishing: family, community, religion, and work.”

Clearly, if one believes such things, then the “controlled burn” of Trump’s second reign would be an absolute necessity to prevent much more destruction and suffering later on. But, while the ideologues of the Heritage Foundation are certainly true believers, the one thing we can always be certain of regarding Trump is that he believes in nothing at all besides himself. That is, while they imagine themselves careful stewards enriching the earth for future generations, the fires they’ve helped light are at the mercy of the very same unpredictable winds their opponents thought they could control.

History is littered with the ruins of great plans, and the most ruinous of all have been those which relied upon government power to manifest them. Two things are equally true here, both collapsing into the singular figure of Wildfire Trump. The first is a warning to these new ascendant ideologues, and the other to the panicked souls mourning the death of the previous order:

If you require an authoritarian strongman to manifest your destiny, then that destiny was never yours in the first place.

And if a single authoritarian strongman can destroy an entire order of being, that order was never going to survive anyway.

Those putting their faith in Trump to recreate the world in their own image are making the very same mistake the faithful of the progressive/neoliberal order made. Cultural change cannot be forced or mandated through executive orders and policy papers, because culture is the field of human relations and not of law or police actions. The “culture wars” of the past decade have all anyway taken place primarily in the cultural wasteland of social media, where people only mimic the true field of human creation. There is no religion, no family, no community, and absolutely no revolution to be had on the internet, only disembodied people masturbating over simulacra of such things.

Trump will certainly rage and burn, and there will be just as much to mourn in those ashes as there will be wisdom sprouting therein. As with the wildfires of Southern California, we must pause for each tragic ending of individual worlds while understanding also how not every world can — or even should — expand to become our world, as well.

That is, we must grieve in the way the Scottish poet Robert Burns grieved upon accidentally destroying the nest of a mouse while plowing his field:

But Mousie, thou art no thy-lane,
In proving foresight may be vain:
The best laid schemes o’ Mice an’ Men
Gang aft agley,
An’ lea’e us nought but grief an’ pain,
For promis’d joy!

We must mourn the destruction while also holding an expanded and longer-term awareness of the causes and effects of that destruction. For the wildfires in Southern California, such an expanded awareness means acknowledging both the individual grief over lost homes and also the unsustainability of buildings such homes in those lands.

For the wildfire that is Trump, this means holding both the grief and fear of those reliant on the progressive/neoliberal order as well as a deeper historical acknowledgment of how unstable that order always was. Especially because of its reliance on government mandate and even force to manifest its utopian promises, it was never going to permanently change things for the people it claimed to defend.

And despite their smug belief that a more permanent order has arrived, the ideologues of the Project 2025 Playbook will certainly suffer the same fate. Few of the crises its architects try to address can be truly averted, because they are generated by the same economic system they claim can save us. Neither they, nor the wildfire they think they control, can ever save capitalism from itself.

Despite their claims that the United States government has been captured by “Marxist activists,” there’s been nothing Marxist or even anti-capitalist about the previous order. DEI and other social justice frameworks have never had any place in Marxist thought, specifically because they seek not an end to capitalism, but rather its salvation.

As I explained in my book Here Be Monsters: How To Fight Capitalism Instead of Each Other, social justice politics and policies have attempted to replace material (class) concerns with ever-expanding and ever-reproducing identity categories that cannot ever address the core rot of capitalism:

“At the expense of changing the composition of the capitalist class (fewer white and male capitalists, more black trans women and disabled, non-binary capitalists of color), capitalism can remain intact and unchallenged. It’s the proposition that Benjamin noted fascism offers the masses: expression rather than any meaningful change in property relations. Greater representation of identity concerns in government and more individuals from oppressed identity groups being represented in the capitalist class may look like change, but it will have no real effect on property relations within capitalism.”

In fact, through their “controlled burn” of identitarian government capture, they may even inadvertently create fertile ground for something even more powerful to take root. From the ashes we may finally see the birth of a broad-based movement that will challenge and destroy both the reactionary fanatics of the Heritage Foundation and also the elite who’ve benefited most from the suppression of class analysis.

Fire destroys, and fire creates. This is as it’s always been, and as it always will be. Wildfires will always sweep across the land, burning forests and worlds to the ground. For us is only to understand its power, grieve what is lost, and cultivate the new life that will soon sprout in the charred and deeply fertile soil it creates.

PS: From now until my upcoming 48th birthday (Valentines’ Day), you can get 20% off print editions of all my titles at Sul Books. See all my books here and use code RHYD25 at checkout.

1. https://www.fire.ca.gov/incidents/2025/1/22/hughes-fire

2. https://terralingua.org/2020/10/08/wildfires-and-the-ancient-indigenous-art-of-fire-management/

3. https://www.inc.com/brian-contreras/the-cost-of-the-los-angeles-fires-is-looking-like-30-billion-and-counting/91111161

4. https://droughtmonitor.unl.edu/CurrentMap/StateDroughtMonitor.aspx?CA

5. https://www.encounterbooks.com/features/dawns-early-light/