Wildfires have become a political topic. »

ANGELES» President LOS Donald Trump took to Twitter to blame bad forest management. Gov. Jerry Brown pointed to climate change.

Their arguments about the cause of disastrous wildfires roaring across the state have turned a California catastrophe into the latest political cudgel in the ongoing slugfest between Washington and Sacramento.

Both leaders are in a sense promoting their political agendas. In Trump’s case, that is an attack on environmental regulations. In Brown’s, it is a call to arms to slow global warming.

But as is often with political rhetoric, reality is far more complicated.

The Trump-Brown exchange ignores what many experts consider core reasons for fire’s escalating toll: Humans keep sparking them, and Californians keep building in high-fire zones prone to the fierce winds that inevitably drive the state’s most calamitous blazes.

In a tweet posted in the wee hours of Saturday, Trump framed a lack of logging as the sole cause.

“There is no reason for these massive, deadly and costly forest fires in California except that forest management is so poor,” Trump tweeted after the Camp fire — the deadliest wildfire in modern state history — leveled much of the Sierra Nevada foothills town of Paradise.

“Billions of dollars are given each year, with so many lives lost, all because of gross mismanagement of the forests. Remedy now, or no more Fed payments!” Trump declared.

The next day, Brown called the firestorms that have flared from Paradise to Malibu the “new abnormal” that threaten Californians’ way of life.

“Managing all the forests everywhere we can, does not stop climate change,” Brown said. “And those who deny that definitely are contributing to the tragedies that we are witnessing and will continue to witness.”

What’s missing in this politicization of wildfire, said Char Miller, director of environmental analysis at Pomona College, is a vital question: “Why is it, that at the county, city, town level, we have repeatedly greenlit development in areas that we know are fire zones?

“Whether it is to allow a rock star to build on a ridgeline in Malibu or a manufactured home community that nestles into the foothills, the decision is the same and the consequences are the same. People who have been routed out of their houses have lost their possessions, and many people have lost their lives.”