Oops, she did it again.
A little over 18 months after Democratic Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass was in Ghana while the Palisades fire burned wide swaths of her city, the mayor was again MIA as a huge blaze consumed a significant part of her city.
This time, Bass was at the grand opening of the Obama Death Sta– um, I mean Obama Presidential Center in Chicago, a city decidedly not in California, nor in her jurisdiction.
This was in spite of the fact that, as she was at the Thursday ceremony, a “massive, multi-jurisdictional warehouse fire” was burning in the Boyle Heights neighborhood of the city, one which presented a “looming biohazard threat,” according to Los Angeles’ KTTV-TV.
The blaze broke out Wednesday at a nearly 500,000-square-foot cold storage facility, reportedly due to a what Los Angeles Fire Department Chief Jaime Moore said was a “solar farm” on the building’s roof.
While the fire started at 2:30 p.m. and was initially thought to be under control by 5:30 p.m., shifting winds caused it to spread. As of Monday, firefighters were still battling the blaze.
Do you think Karen Bass cheated during the primaries?
“We have 85 million pounds of frozen food inside of this facility, and the way the building has been laid out, it’s very difficult for us to get in there because there’s zero visibility inside,” Moore said, according to ABC News.
“Our firefighters are not able to just go in there and start moving pallets.”
California Gov. Gavin Newsom has declared a state of emergency as crews continue to battle a fire that started days ago at a cold storage facility in Los Angeles. https://t.co/gHARDXflhW pic.twitter.com/qx7pqnXQbL
— ABC News (@ABC) June 21, 2026
Both Bass and California Gov. Gavin Newsom have declared states of emergency over the blaze.
“The city and county have opened spaces for families seeking relief from the smoke, and we will continue working around the clock and doing everything possible to put this fire out completely,” Bass said.
I mean, except for the mayor staying in the city. From The Root about Thursday’s events in Illinois:
For one day in Chicago, the Obama era came flooding back.
The people who believed in Barack Obama when he was still running for Senate like Stevie Wonder, alongside the advisers who helped carry him to the White House. There were elected officials still in the middle of political fights, like state Rep. Shomari Figures, who has been battling over redistricting in Tennessee, and Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass, who quietly slipped backstage during the ceremony as she faces a tough re-election race.
Bass, facing a tough reelection race? Why, pray tell?
JUST IN: Los Angeles mayor Karen Bass freezes up while getting absolutely skewered by a reporter for her horrible policies.
This is exactly how these people should be treated.
Reporter: “Do you owe citizens an apology for being absent while their homes were burning?”
“Do you… pic.twitter.com/IDMTiclsKH
— Collin Rugg (@CollinRugg) January 8, 2025
This is Bass returning from Ghana, a country also not in her jurisdiction, refusing to answer questions during the 2025 Palisades fires despite the fact that she’d been warned about high winds before she left for the trip to attend that country’s presidential inauguration.
This abdication provided an ample opportunity for her to be attacked from both the left (Democratic socialist Los Angeles City Councilwoman Nithya Raman) and the right (Republican Spencer Pratt, the reality TV star whose house burned in the blaze) during the jungle primary. (Raman ended up advancing to November’s general election along with Bass; according to RealClearPolitics, there have been no major polls since the June 2 primary.)
Bass had promised not to go abroad before taking office in 2023: “The only places I would go would be D.C., Sacramento, San Francisco and New York, in relation to LA,” she said, according to The New York Times.
She broke this promise, then vowed to investigate why she was allowed to go abroad and break that promise despite the fire danger.
NEW: LA Mayor Karen Bass says she’s investigating why she was allowed to go on a trip to Ghana days before the LA fires.
Investigating someone else for something you did is wild.
Bass: That level of preparation really didn’t happen. So it didn’t reach that level to me. No one… pic.twitter.com/k7DtUqIRJy
— Collin Rugg (@CollinRugg) February 19, 2025
It takes a special kind of lunacy to break your own promise and then hold an investigation into who was responsible for you breaking your own promise at a time when your city needed you the most. I’m not even sure words can properly express the absurdity involved in basically doing it again — this time just via domestic travel, admittedly — 18 months later, when your political career is at stake and another blaze was consuming a cold-storage warehouse that was becoming a biohazard.
It’s interesting that Karen Bass @KarenBassLA promised she wouldn’t travel other than NY, SF, and DC but now has been caught traveling the world, even after all her lies and pathetic PR about how upset she was to be in Ghana during the Palisades fire
Karen Bass has got to go https://t.co/vrfgbMknqu
— KarenBassProgressReport (@KBassProgReport) June 22, 2026
Karen Bass: Obviously I hated the fact that I was out of the city when the city needed me the most….It was a mistake to travel.
Also Karen Bass: Hell yeah I’m goin to Obama’s Presidential Library while Los Angeles burns. pic.twitter.com/ShpRWgMYSE
— Kevin Dalton (@TheKevinDalton) June 22, 2026
Meanwhile, the U.K. Guardian says that the fire will take “at least a few more days” to extinguish, which is a problem when Bass’ office is putting out messages like this, which underscore that this isn’t just some minor thing:
— Mayor Karen Bass (@MayorOfLA) June 20, 2026
In addition to extremely unhealthy air readings in Boyle Heights and high particulate readings throughout the San Gabriel Valley, winds could disperse the smoke throughout the Los Angeles region before it can be put out.
“I don’t know that we’ll ever get firefighters inside because the entire roof has been compromised and it is sitting on top of [those] 65-foot towers,” Moore said. “It’s extremely dangerous, and I don’t foresee ever putting our firefighters in that type of danger.”
Here’s an idea: Why not give Bass some crash lessons in firefighting and send her up there? After all, she’s proved herself willing to put herself into electoral danger repeatedly, despite her better judgment — as evinced by the fact she’d promised not to abandon LA before she took office. With that kind of foresight, she sounds like just the kind of woman for the job.
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