He cannot fail. He can only be failed.
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.
“Nobody has any idea how and why a thing like this could
happen,” 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 could’ve saved lives, Trump responded that “only an evil person would ask a question like that.”
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, it’s 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 else’s fault, whether that someone is God or Gavin Newsom.
If Trump is never responsible for disaster, it makes sense
that he shouldn’t prepare for disasters. He can’t prevent or fix anything, so
trying is just a waste of money. That twisted logic has guided Trump’s policy,
and there is good reason to believe that it worsened the crisis in Texas — and
will lead to worse and worse disasters throughout Trump’s term.
ICE Barbie’s 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.
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, it’s
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.
“What you’re losing here are the people that actually know
how to build and run programs, and these people aren’t easily replaced,” a
senior official told
CNN. “If 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.”
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, Noem’s new protocols, and diminished
staffing, appears to have kneecapped FEMA’s response. Independent journalist
Marisa Kabas reported that
FEMA had just 86 people on the ground on July 7, days after the disaster.
“We 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,” a FMEA employee told Kabas. But
thanks to Trump and Noem, “we are doing a lot less than normal.”
Noem also gutted FEMA’s emergency call center system
literally while the disaster was ongoing. According to the NYT,
on July 5, “FEMA received 3,027 calls from disaster survivors and answered
3,018, or roughly 99.7 percent.” 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 don’t know what happened to the
hundreds of people who didn’t receive answers to their emergency calls.
Undoubtedly, they experienced stress and fear. It’s entirely possible that some
of them sustained unnecessary injuries, or even died.
Trump will not learn
Trump’s 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, he’s now
talking about “rebranding” the agency. He wants to emphasize state official’s
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 “look like
into the future.”
It’s good that FEMA isn’t going to be eliminated. But
there’s 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 “just a
way of giving out pork.” 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 administration’s
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
“[W]e’ve learned a lot and we can mobilize, you know, we can
mobilize,” he burbled in
a Time Magazine interview.
To Trump, preparation and mobilization are entirely divorced
from each other; they’re 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 doesn’t 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: “Nobody has any idea” how flash floods,
or covid, could happen; anyone who questions Trump’s failures is “evil.”
Trump feels he is entitled to the blessing of God — 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 he’s not aggrieved because people die
and suffer and lose their lives and property. He’s aggrieved because people
question him.
In the world of MAGA, we should all be happy to sacrifice
ourselves for the glory of Trump.
