Donald Trump, Hurricane Helene, And The Folly Of "Turning The Page"
Donald Trump, Hurricane Helene, And The Folly Of "Turning The Page"
His lies would be less damaging if Democrats had put more effort into cementing memories of his failed presidency.
For almost three full days, right-wing lies about the federal response to Hurricane Helene circulated with little pushback on social media.
By Monday, Donald Trump arrived in the south for a photo op and started spewing the same propaganda.
Trump alleged that Joe Biden and Kamala Harris “left Americans to drown in North Carolina, Georgia, Tennessee, Alabama, and elsewhere in the South,” making sure to list the two affected swing states before the rest of the affected region. He referred dubiously to “reports I am getting about the Federal Government and the Democratic Governor of [North Carolina] going out of their way to not help people in Republican areas,” and claimed that Brian Kemp, the Republican governor of Georgia, was “having a hard time getting the president on the phone.”
That was finally enough to elicit a response from Biden.
“He’s lying,” Biden said Monday after an Oval Office presentation. “The governor told him he was lying…. I don’t know why he does this. The reason I get so angry about it—I don’t care what he says about me, I care what he communicates to the people that are in need. He implies that we aren’t doing everything possible. We are.”
I suspect Biden knows well why Trump does what he does, and cares to some extent what Trump says about him. Not because Trump has the power to hurt Biden’s feelings, but because disinformation about the government response to a natural disaster could be a potent vote mover. We can infer this from the fact that accurate information about the federal response to natural disasters has done serious political damage to GOP presidents.
Had Trump responded to COVID-19 in a passingly competent and empathetic way, he probably would have won re-election. George W. Bush was already a lame duck when Hurricane Katrina destroyed New Orleans, but the ensuing humanitarian crisis marked the beginning of his political collapse.
Most Americans, of course, could not evaluate the Bush administration’s response to Katrina on their own. The overwhelming majority of the population lived outside the path of the storm, and vanishingly few of us understood the logistical complexities of emergency management. We witnessed scenes of devastation on television and heard from trusted sources that there was a connection between the suffering on the ground and Bush’s official actions, which included the hobbling of FEMA.
The scenes of devastation in western North Carolina today are similarly gutting—Hurricane Helene, and its trajectory after landfall, created a cataclysm much like Katrina did. And if people now develop a false impression that those scenes are connected to incompetence or depravity within the Biden administration (which, for GOP electoral purposes, is now the Biden-Harris administration) it will ripple into campaign politics.
But Biden is right, morally and politically, to remain mum about the election and focus on the psychic harm Trump’s lies will do to people who trust him—desperate Americans who now believe help isn’t coming, or that Biden is punishing Republican strongholds intentionally. The flip side of the political damage Trump’s lies might do to Biden and Harris is that the nature of Trump’s conduct—lying to make hurricane victims feel abandoned for his own personal benefit—is outrageous. If his lying becomes the story, instead of ‘the trading of attacks’ juxtaposed against pictures of flood-ravaged villages, Trump will suffer, just as he suffered recently for libeling Haitian immigrants and terrorizing the town of Springfield, OH.
Headway toward recovery and vigorous pushback may well be enough to limit the political reach of Trump’s lies, and the fact that Trump is plainly lying will help. Kemp was honest enough to note that he and Biden spoke on Sunday, that he told Biden he had all the resources he needs, and that Biden “offered that if there's other things we need, just to call him directly, which, I appreciate that."
Still, the fact that Trump of all people can parachute into a disaster zone and claim the high ground to any effect at all is the consequence of a fateful political error.