The devastation from the fires that swept California last week were made even worse by the Democratic leaders' responses. Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass, for instance, was away attending the new president's inauguration in Ghana, leaving questions about who was running one of the country's largest cities. What makes such a trip even worse is that Bass' comments from 2021 are resurfacing in which she vowed not to take them.
The New York Times is going over Bass, highlighting her remarks from a little more than three years ago, in a piece Sunday night damningly titled, "Before Taking Office, L.A.’s Mayor Said She Would Not Go Abroad."
NEWS:
— Ryan Saavedra (@RealSaavedra) January 12, 2025
In 2021, LA Mayor Karen Bass (D) promised during an interview that she would not travel internationally if she was elected
She broke her pledge when she was in Africa last week as fires erupted in LA despite warnings that the city was on high alert for fires pic.twitter.com/Dnzuh64Hkw
The piece begins by mentioning how Bass saw it as "a potential drawback to the job" for there to be "a lack of world travel and involvement in global affairs." She expressed not wanting to give up international travel before she changed her mind in her mayoral run, or so she claimed.
As the piece continued, quoting her as saying [emphasis added]:
“I went to Africa every couple of months, all the time,” she said, adding, “The idea of leaving that, especially the international work and the Africa work, I was like, ‘Mmm, I don’t think I want to do that.’”
She ultimately decided that she did, telling The Times that if she was elected mayor, “not only would I of course live here, but I also would not travel internationally — the only places I would go would be D.C., Sacramento, San Francisco and New York, in relation to L.A.”
That pledge has been spectacularly broken.
When a cascade of deadly and destructive wildfires erupted across the Los Angeles region on Tuesday, the mayor was on her way home from Ghana in West Africa, where she had attended the inauguration of a new president.
It was not her first trip abroad as mayor. A review of her public daily schedule for the past year shows that Ms. Bass has traveled out of the country at city expense at least four other times in recent months before the Ghana visit — once to Mexico for the inauguration of President Claudia Sheinbaum and three times to France for the 2024 Olympic Games in Paris.
Her broken promise to cut off overseas travel and her busy international schedule since becoming mayor in December 2022 scarcely registered with the public before the wildfires, and Los Angeles voters accepted — and in some cases even welcomed — the mayor’s identity not just as a municipal leader but also as a Washington-style global player. Now, though, her decision to leave the country at a time when the National Weather Service was warning of “extreme fire weather conditions” has set off a political crisis for Ms. Bass.
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Bass herself did not return request for comment, the piece noted, and a statement from her spokesperson is laughable. Spokesman Zach Seidl claims that the mayor is "laser focused on ongoing response and recovery efforts," though that doesn't extend to being able to competently answer questions about the fire herself, specifically how she's handled it and her trip abroad.
He also had a curious statement about the 2021 comments. "In light of the Olympics coming, that the city owns and operates the nation’s largest international trade hub, and that a third of Angelenos were born abroad, this was, of course, a miscommunication — mayors of Los Angeles routinely travel internationally," he offered.
While the piece defends Bass in some ways, and references criticisms as coming from her opponents, it's not all kind to the mayor. There's also highlighting how this is a pattern:
But her travel — both domestically and internationally — has at times complicated her handling of civic emergencies. Her trip to Ghana was not the first time she was out of town when crises and news events big and small broke out.
During that late April trip to Washington, pro-Palestinian protests at U.C.L.A. turned violent. She cut the trip short and flew back on May 1, issuing statements along the way to reassure residents.
While she was in France for the closing ceremony of the Olympics in August, Gov. Gavin Newsom showed up at a mid-city underpass to make the point that local governments needed to do more to clear homeless encampments. While she was in Paris for the Paralympic Games in September, the National Weather Service issued an excessive heat warning for Los Angeles, with 117-degree forecasts. Power outages forced the cancellation of a show at the Hollywood Bowl.
There's multiple mentions of how Los Angeles will host the Olympic Games in 2028 as some kind of excuse for Bass to travel abroad in Paris for the games that were just held there last summer, but there were also issues going on in the city that the mayor is supposed to govern.
The pro-Hamas protests on college campuses, including and especially UCLA, which not only "turned violent" as The New York Times acknowledged, but have resulted in lawsuits from Jewish students against the university, also took place during yet another one of Bass' trips.
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