After the first rally in her campaign for mayor of Los Angeles in 2021, Karen Bass spoke candidly about what she saw as a potential drawback to the job — a lack of world travel and involvement in global affairs.

Bass was accustomed to circling the globe as a Democratic member of Congress and of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, and had spent decades working on U.S.-Africa relations. It was one of the most absorbing parts of her political career, she told The New York Times in an interview on Oct. 17, 2021, at her home in the Baldwin Vista neighborhood of Los Angeles.

“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.’”

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Bass Says She Would Not Travel Internationally

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 LA.”

That pledge has been spectacularly broken.

When a cascade of deadly and destructive wildfires erupted across the Los Angeles region Tuesday, the mayor was on her way home from Ghana in West Africa, where she 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 Bass has traveled out of the country at city expense at least four other times in recent months before the Ghana visit.

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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 the mayor’s identity not just as a municipal leader but 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 Bass.

Rivals have lashed out. Liberal supporters whose homes burned down have become outraged critics. An online petition demanding her immediate resignation has attracted more than 100,000 signatures. MAGA Republicans and their allies have swarmed social media, amplifying and exploiting the anger.

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This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

By Shawn Hubler and Soumya Karlamangla/Alex Welsh
c. 2025 The New York Times Company