Two reasons: Cash and political viability, and probably not in that order. Gavin Newsom finds himself in a deep political crisis over the consequences of years-long failures to prioritize core public-safety infrastructure over pet progressive projects. And now he needs Donald Trump to rescue him.

The Wall Street Journal notes that Newsom contradicted Joe Biden's order on flag display to return them to full staff for the inauguration on Monday. That gesture provided a strange moment of discordance with Newsom's previous desire to marshal California resources -- $50 million, approved by a special session of the legislature as Los Angeles burned -- to mount a "resistance" to the incoming Trump administration. 

There's really no mystery to the why. Trump travels to California today to see the disaster personally, and Newsom is now in the position of supplicant for more aid from a critic of Newsom's reign. Trump made that clear before getting on Air Force One for the first time in his new term:

Since the fires broke out Jan. 7, Trump has used social media and interviews to accuse the state of sending too much water to the Pacific Ocean instead of south toward Los Angeles and highlighted how some hydrants ran dry in the early hours of the firefight in Pacific Palisades.

In the first hours of his second term, Trump called on federal officials to draft plans to route more water to the crop-rich Central Valley and densely populated cities in the southern part of the state. Two days later he threatened to withhold federal disaster aid unless California leaders change the state’s approach on water.

The Associated Press actually provides an accurate and fair assessment of the dispute between Newsom and Trump over water management, which went back to Trump's first term. Trump directed federal agencies to prioritize the Central Valley over the delta smelt, which would also have allowed for better supplies of water for firefighting. Newsom sued to block it, and then got Joe Biden to reverse Trump's orders:

Gov. Gavin Newsom filed a lawsuit saying the rules would drive endangered fish populations to extinction. There were concerns about the tiny delta smelt, which is seen as an indicator of the waterway’s health, as well as and chinook salmon and steelhead trout, which return annually from the Pacific to spawn in freshwater rivers.

Then-President Joe Biden’s administration issued its own rules in December that environmental groups said provided modest improvements over those of the first Trump administration.

For some reason, the WSJ's take on this is entirely circular and sophist:

Trump has blamed Newsom for the crisis, saying the state’s water-management efforts are overprotective of wildlife and therefore limit the amount of flow to the city. He and other Republicans said falsely that a lack of water was what caused fire hydrants in the Pacific Palisades to run dry. 

Trump vowed to help fire victims during his inauguration speech, and he issued an executive order his first day in office titled “PUTTING PEOPLE OVER FISH”—intended to route more water from northern to southern California. 

Local officials have said lack of water wasn’t the issue. Instead, demand overwhelmed the system and pressure dropped.

Er ... wut? Isn't that a perfect description of a "lack of water"? This is as stupid as arguing that a fall off of a building isn't what kills people, but the sudden stop at the end.

The city built the Santa Ynez reservoir in large part to have enough water to meet the demand of wildfire defenses, and the city left it empty for a full year. As the Los Angeles Times reported this morning, the city and county of Los Angeles as well as the state of California were well aware that their infrastructure was insufficient for fighting these kinds of fires, going back at least to 2013. State and local governments willingly ignored the problem, either out of incompetence or malice. That's entirely separate from the 2014 initiative approved by California voters that authorized $7 billion to vastly expand water infrastructure -- which has also been ignored.  Instead, Newsom poured billions into Democrats high-speed rail fantasy that has not produced a single mile of use in two decades of spending. 

The devastation in Los Angeles has now exposed the rotten edifice of its city government as well as Newsom's administration. The only way for Newsom to avoid the accountability that will come is to get a deluge of federal funds in order to white-knight himself out of the crisis that he and his party made exponentially worse than it had to be. If that means sucking up to Trump, well ...

Newsom, who can’t seek a third term as governor, was able to get former President Joe Biden to approve initial relief for six months. But future federal aid is largely in Trump’s hands. Johnson has said conditions related to how the state maintains its water and land should be attached to future aid, and Trump previously considered withholding aid to Democratic-led states and territories. 

Trump is set to visit California on Friday. In an interview with Fox News’s Sean Hannity on Wednesday, Trump said he hadn’t thought about whether he will meet Newsom. Newsom’s office said the governor would meet Trump on the tarmac.

I hope Newsom remembered to bring his kneepads. He'll need them on the tarmac.