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President Donald Trump presents himself as strong, indomitable, and always forceful. But when disaster strikes β whether hurricane, flash flood, or pandemic β heβs oddly helpless.
To hear Trump tell it, he has infinite power to do good and no power to do bad, and anyone who says otherwise is an enemy of the country. To believe in MAGA is to believe in his simultaneous omnipotence and impotence, depending on whichever is convenient for partisan purposes.
This dynamic has been on full display following the recent disaster in central Texas.
Torrential rains and floods early July 4 accounted for 129 deaths so far, and with many people still missing, the toll is expected to continue to rise. Trump traveled to the affected area last Friday, and his response when questioned about the government response was studiously ignorant.
βNobody has any idea how and why a thing like this could happen,β he insisted. (Trump, of course, is a climate change denier.)
When a reporter asked what his message is to families who say earlier alerts about the flooding couldβve saved lives, Trump responded that βonly an evil person would ask a question like that.β
Last year, however, Trump was that evil person, insisting (nonsensically and falsely) that California Gov. Gavin Newsom had exacerbated California wildfires by preventing firefighters from accessing water.
This kind of partisan hypocrisy is the norm for Trump. In fact, itβs so typical, and so obvious, that it almost stops being hypocrisy and becomes a kind of ethos.
Trump is never responsible for anything and any disaster is always someone elseβs fault, whether that someone is God or Gavin Newsom.
If Trump is never responsible for disaster, it makes sense that he shouldnβt prepare for disasters. He canβt prevent or fix anything, so trying is just a waste of money. That twisted logic has guided Trumpβs policy, and there is good reason to believe that it worsened the crisis in Texas β and will lead to worse and worse disasters throughout Trumpβs term.
ICE Barbieβs war on FEMA
Trump sees disaster preparedness as irrelevant and useless; he also mistrusts all federal employees who are not sycophantic loyalists. As a result, he and billionaire donor Elon Musk launched the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), which recklessly and illegally dismantled the federal workforce, including the portion of it dedicated to emergency services.
Trump slashed the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and National Weather Service (NWS), the two agencies most focused on weather forecasting, cutting 24,000 employees from the first and some 550 from the second.
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In a chaotic disaster situation, it can be difficult to tell exactly how these kinds of cuts affect response on the ground. Local officials initially claimed that NWS had failed to provide accurate forecasts, and that that had slowed evacuation orders. However, independent forecasters believe that, despite cuts, the NWS forecasts were timely and accurate.
As more information has become available, though, itβs become clearer how Trump may have undermined the response. The New York Times reported that cuts at the Austin/San Antonio NWS office meant that there was no warning coordination meteorologist when the floods hit. That may have affected outreach to local officials during the emergency.
The Texas Tribune reported that Texas state lawmakers rejected a bill to upgrade early warning systems, because such systems were seen as too expensive. (The state House member who represents Kerr County has already said he regrets that vote.) County residents nixed a flood siren system which might have alerted residents.
This kind of reckless penny-pinching was repeated at the federal level. In April, just before hurricane season, the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) lost about 1,000 employees, or 20 percent of its staff, to buyouts. That was on top of another 800 employees who departed earlier in the year.
βWhat youβre losing here are the people that actually know how to build and run programs, and these people arenβt easily replaced,β a senior official told CNN. βIf their desire was to break the ability of the agency to do business, then they are succeeding without question. But they have not done any work building something to replace it.β
In addition, CNN reported that Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem issued a memo stating her intention to micromanage FEMA spending and funding in disasters. Experts were concerned that this would slow disaster relief.
And sure enough, Noemβs new protocols, and diminished staffing, appears to have kneecapped FEMAβs response. Independent journalist Marisa Kabas reported that FEMA had just 86 people on the ground on July 7, days after the disaster.
βWe would [usually] have hundreds of people on scene in FEMA jackets registering people for assistance, regional coordination center fully activated, national at least partly activated,β a FMEA employee told Kabas. But thanks to Trump and Noem, βwe are doing a lot less than normal.β
Noem also gutted FEMAβs emergency call center system literally while the disaster was ongoing. According to the NYT, on July 5, βFEMA received 3,027 calls from disaster survivors and answered 3,018, or roughly 99.7 percent.β At the end of that day, however, Noem did not renew contracts with emergency call centers, leading to the layoff of hundreds of contractors. On July 6, with capacity decimated, FEMA received 2,363 calls and answered only 846, or roughly 35.8 percent. On July 7, response rates dropped further, to 15.9 percent.
Noem renewed the contracts five days later, but we still donβt know what happened to the hundreds of people who didnβt receive answers to their emergency calls. Undoubtedly, they experienced stress and fear. Itβs entirely possible that some of them sustained unnecessary injuries, or even died.
Trump will not learn
Trumpβs assault on emergency management systems damaged emergency response. It would be nice to believe that he will reverse course and try to be better prepared for the next flood, hurricane, or earthquake. But we know better.
Trump has backed away from his earlier bluster about destroying FEMA altogether. Instead, heβs now talking about βrebrandingβ the agency. He wants to emphasize state officialβs role in disaster response, which in practice probably means he wants to blame state officials when things go wrong.
Noem in fact claimed over the weekend that her slow, ineffective, deadly response would be a model for what FEMA would βlook like into the future.β
Itβs good that FEMA isnβt going to be eliminated. But thereβs little reason to believe Trump will fire Noem for gross incompetence, or fight for more funding for the agency, or try to rehire staff.
In 2024, after all, Trump claimed he would disband the Office of Pandemic Preparedness, which he claimed was βjust a way of giving out pork.β But he should already understand the danger in this line of thinking. After he disbanded a previous pandemic response team during his first term, the covid pandemic hit in 2020. The Trump administrationβs bungling contributed to around 1.2 million deaths in the US and widespread economic dislocation.
Trump, however, sees no connection between preparation and harm reduction. Instead, the horrific covid fallout is in his view a reason not to prepare
β[W]eβve learned a lot and we can mobilize, you know, we can mobilize,β he burbled in a Time Magazine interview.
To Trump, preparation and mobilization are entirely divorced from each other; theyβre just catchphrases floating loosely around the inside of his empty orange skull.
Trump makes no sense, but there is, again, a kind of consistency to the sense he doesnβt make. For Trump, disasters exist to provide him with partisan advantage.
He initially slow walked the federal covid response because he believed the disease would only affect blue states, harming their governors and leaving him untouched. And shortly after his second inauguration, he said he would deny California wildfire aid unless the state implemented voter ID laws.
But when disaster strikes red states, he praises his political allies no matter the level of death or horror, as he has done in Texas. When disasters do cause political problems for Trump, he reacts with a mix of confusion and snarling outrage: βNobody has any ideaβ how flash floods, or covid, could happen; anyone who questions Trumpβs failures is βevil.β
Trump feels he is entitled to the blessing of God β that blessing meaning that only his enemies are burned up in forest fires or drowned in floods. When the blessing is withheld, when people in red states suffer and Trump gets blamed, he is aggrieved. But heβs not aggrieved because people die and suffer and lose their lives and property. Heβs aggrieved because people question him.
In the world of MAGA, we should all be happy to sacrifice ourselves for the glory of Trump.
Thatβs it for today
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Great observations. Could these climate disasters, like Katrina under Bush, be what finally snaps people out of the mass trance he has created and which has been supported daily by news outlets like Fox and brutally sycophantic mouthpieces like Noem? I think itβs a possibility. Between this and the Epstein business, we are seeing small tears in his cape of invincibility. Straight up facts about things like the avalanche of unanswered FEMA disaster response calls after Noemβs idiotic decision need to be blasted out to the public. Thanks for doing your part.
That Congressional Republicans sit quietly allowing Trump to ravage our safety net unchecked should give their constituents a very good reason to think long and hard about the midterms, and whether it is worth potentially sacrificing their safety and the futures of their children to the glory of Donald J Trump.