New Yorker On President Shitstain's Farcical Texas Fly-By
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The problem is not that President Trump does not realize that Harvey is huge; a number of his tweets on the storm have contained the word “Wow,” and he called it “epic” and “historic,” adding that “Texas can handle anything!” But the enormity of the situation does not seem to have organized his thoughts beyond declarations of how it will be matched by the greatness of his Administration and its allies. On the flight to Texas, on Tuesday morning, he had retweeted a message from Brazoria County, which consisted of a red box containing the words “NOTICE: The Levee at Columbia Lakes has been breached!! GET OUT NOW!!” Get out to where? What are the practical consequences of a breach? Trump didn’t say. (Vox has a more technical breakdown of the levee situation.)
In Corpus Christi, speaking to Governor Abbott, Trump began by acknowledging that it wasn’t time for congratulations, but offered a prediction that Houston would soon be better than ever: “We’ll congratulate each other when it’s all finished.” Later in the day, at a briefing at a control center in Austin, he said that his team’s coördination had been “incredible—everybody’s talking about it,” then offered this observation on the challenge that they faced: “Nobody has ever seen this much water. . . . The water has never been seen like this, to this, to the extent. And it’s, uh, maybe someday going to disappear. We keep waiting!” Trump had recognized the magnitude of the moment, at least as a news story, even before Harvey made landfall; on Monday, when he was asked why he had chosen that time to announce his pardon of Joe Arpaio, the disgraced former sheriff of Maricopa County, Arizona, Trump said, “Actually, in the middle of a hurricane, even though it was a Friday evening, I assumed the ratings would be far higher than they would be normally.”
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What will be harder is persuading not only Trump but the Republican Party that Harvey has a reality that reaches beyond the borders of this storm, and involves major policy issues. Both Senators Cruz and Cornyn voted against a major emergency-relief bill allocating funds for rebuilding and recovery after Superstorm Sandy. Cruz, in particular, has misrepresented that bill’s contents and its purpose, saying that two-thirds of the money in it wasn’t really related to Sandy but was, rather, pork and other wasteful government spending. (Glenn Kessler, the Washington Post’s fact checker, gave Cruz three Pinocchios for that.) Cruz and others, including Speaker of the House Paul Ryan, also complained that the bill wasn’t really for emergency spending because it covered things like improving forecasts and repairing damaged infrastructure in a way that protected it against the next storm. This time, for the congressional Republicans, as much as for Trump, the emergency can’t stop when the rain does.
The federal government, as it exists beyond the White House, has been busy in its response to the immediate disaster. It undoubtedly helps that the director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, Brock Long, worked on the response to Hurricane Katrina, and has had a sense of how badly things can be mismanaged. (On Tuesday, the twelfth anniversary of that storm, Harvey was turning toward the Louisiana coast and New Orleans.) The local authorities have also been indefatigable, though the decision that Houston’s mayor, Sylvester Turner (a Democrat), made to discourage a mass evacuation of the city before the storm will be debated, and criticized, for years. But part of the legacy of Katrina was more regulations about, for example, building standards, which are precisely the sort of rules that Trump has pledged to roll back; indeed, he revoked some requirements related to flood controls on federal projects just weeks ago. Ben Carson has also disparaged the role of government in providing aid, and of his own department in housing those in need. How will that ideological insistence on limited government translate into practical help for Houston’s homeless and dispossessed? The challenge that Harvey presents is not simply logistical; it is political.
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https://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/what-did-donald-trump-learn-in-texas
