President Donald Trump took a jab at California Governor Gavin Newsom by posting a video of a chaotic situation on the streets of Los Angeles.
The 48-second clip, shared to Truth Social Easter Sunday by the president, shows a woman using a wrench to force open a fire hydrant in order to wash a bucket of blankets.
“This is downtown Los Angeles, California, where Hollywood is at,” a narrator says. “'This is not a movie, though. It's not a joke, and it's not a publicity stunt. This is the reality that people are living in.”
The woman can be seen in the video dumping a large plastic container of dirty water into the street as a car passes by. She then drops a blanket into the container and turns a wrench on a fire hydrant to fill the receptacle back up.
Later, she sprinkles an unknown material, possibly detergent, into the container.
“Fire hydrants have now been converted into laundromats,” the narrator says.
Trump then posted the video a second time, with a caption from an X account that states: “Los Angeles fire hydrants seem to be working just fine now.”
The president previously took aim at fire hydrants - and Newsom - in January 2025 when the devastating Palisades Fire tore through large parts of the LA area, leaving firefighters struggling to contain the blaze. Pumps could not replenish water fast enough, and about 20 percent of fire hydrants in the city ran dry.
“Governor Gavin Newscum refused to sign the water restoration declaration put before him 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 posted on Truth Social January 8, 2025. “He is the blame for this.”
Newsom, a Democrat, responded at the time with a sharp rebuttal.
“There is no such document as the water restoration declaration – that is pure fiction,” the governor’s communications director told Cal Matters. “The Governor is focused on protecting people, not playing politics, and making sure firefighters have all the resources they need.”
Newsom, seen as a potential contender for the 2028 Democratic presidential nomination, has frequently exchanged barbs with Trump and has turned the president’s social media style of rapid-fire insults against him.
Last month, Trump accused the governor of having “a mental disability," calling him a “very stupid person.”
“I'm the only president that ever took a cognitive test,” Trump said. “I took it three times. It's actually a very hard test for a lot of people. It wasn't hard for me.”
Shortly after, Newsom responded by posting an image on X of a fake cognitive exam. “FALSE,” he wrote. “Gavin Newsom is highly intelligent.”
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