Donald Trump Is Already Bungling Disaster Relief

Last year, I discussed the historical cycle of disaster relief in this country since the 1980s. The pattern is consistent: When a Republican has been president, he screws everything up through inattention and corruption, appointing hacks and cronies to important posts, like Michael Brown, the horse-breeding chum of George W. Bush who botched the response to Hurricane Katrina as the administrator of the Federal Emergency Management Agency. Then when a Democrat takes office, they undertake painstaking efforts to clean up FEMA and other agencies, and disaster response goes fairly well.

We saw this happen under the first Trump administration with Hurricane Maria—and with a new wrinkle, where Trump automatically opposed relief to regions that opposed him politically, like Puerto Rico and California. Now, we’re already seeing it again even before Trump takes office for the second time. The worst wildfires in the history of Los Angeles are still burning in and around the city; thousands of homes have been destroyed. In response, Trump and other conservatives have advocated using the crisis as leverage to extract concessions from Democrats, or simply inflict gratuitous punishment on blue states.

Disaster response in this country is about to get much, much worse, and thanks to climate change, multiple major disasters are all but guaranteed over the next four years. That said, there are also potential points of leverage, like the need to raise the debt ceiling soon, that Democrats should be ready to exploit.

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Republicans are practically slavering at the chance to stick it to California liberals. “I certainly wouldn’t vote for anything unless we see a dramatic change in how they’re gonna be handling these things in the future,” said Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI) on Newsmax. They “divert water into the ocean, they don’t fill up their reservoirs, they don’t clean up their forest, they don’t get rid of the underbrush … it’s their fault,” he said.

While both California Democrats and Republicans can be blamed for a broken housing system that pushes development into fire-prone areas, none of Johnson’s charges are true. The local reservoirs were all mostly full, there is no forest in the mountains surrounding Pacific Palisades, and state agencies have spent a lot trying to keep down the undergrowth of chaparral that grows on L.A.’s hills.

Details aside, the actual driver of these specific fires is obviously climate change. These regions around Los Angeles have burned many times, but almost never in the middle of January. And wildland firefighters can tell you that it is virtually impossible to contain a fire driven by winds up to 100 miles per hour; either the weather must change or it must burn itself out. Dems passed a trillion-dollar climate bill to address this problem; Johnson and most other Republicans hate it.

Johnson is making the exact same kind of false accusations that many Republicans made about President Biden and Hurricane Helene. Just as with prior false accusations of liberals “censoring” Dr. Seuss, conservative lies about Democrats often indicate their own future plans.

Oddly, however, one of the concessions that Trump is reportedly discussing, per Politico, is raising the debt ceiling. (Recall this is the anachronistic, senseless rule that no other country has; it stipulates that the federal government can only borrow so much money, even if the borrowing has been mandated by Congress.) Trump needs the ceiling raised pronto because it’s about to be hit—indeed, the Treasury Department is already engaged in accounting tricks to keep from running out of borrowing authority—and because his various economic plans, including his signature tax giveaways to the rich, will almost certainly jack up borrowing a lot more.

I have not yet seen the ultra-right-wingers in the Republican caucus respond to this proposal—but it’s a safe bet they will hate it. The Freedom Caucus has already reacted angrily to previous Trump plans about the debt ceiling; some of them have never voted to raise it (though, mysteriously, budget-busting tax cuts for the rich always get support from this quarter). So if a debt ceiling raise is to get enacted, it will need Democratic votes in the House—in return for which, they could swap their support for adequate disaster aid to Trump’s least favorite state.

If this deal is actually on the table—or one for getting rid of the stupid debt limit entirely, which Trump has previously suggested—I think Democrats would be wise to take it. Traditionally, the party has viewed good-government measures like raising the debt ceiling as necessary and prudent things to do, but all that has done is allow Republicans to take advantage of them. If the GOP can’t get it together with control of both the House and Senate to pass their own bills, the Dems must demand their pound of flesh.

But even if this aid package passes, it won’t solve the crises presented by future disasters. Nor will Trump’s desire to rid the government of the experienced officials who know what to do when disaster strikes. As the Associated Press reports, Trump stooges are already conducting a political purge of the National Security Council career staff, asking “about who they voted for in the 2024 election, their political contributions and whether they have made social media posts that could be considered incriminating by President-elect Donald Trump’s team.” Some have already quit.

This is all but certain to happen at every federal agency, including FEMA, the Bureau of Reclamation, and the Army Corps of Engineers. Career civil servants will be rooted out en masse and replaced with dim-witted Trump stooges with little or no experience—effectively lobotomizing the agencies. Sundry boat dealership owners and Trump relatives will stare blankly as a hurricane bears down on Miami, if not running to Twitter/X to blame it on an international Jewish conspiracy. That’s what voting for Trump gets you.