Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.
Kate Aronoff: Thanks for having me.
Aronoff: Yeah. As you mentioned, over 100 people have been confirmed dead. There’s still ongoing search and rescue efforts, and there’s more rain expected for that specific area of Texas this week. And the debate about why this flood was so deadly and why the response times were so slow is ongoing. The debate at first focused on the National Weather Service. So the National Weather Service is part of NOAA, which the Trump administration has targeted for 20 percent cuts despite it already operating at a staffing deficit for many, many years. And it was Texas officials, actually, who first called out the National Weather Service and tried to pin some of the blame for this destruction on them. And what we see is that’s not right. So the National Weather Service did its job despite these federal attacks on the agency. The NWS began to issue warnings very early in the day on Thursday and then increasingly dire warnings through the evening and then until the early hours of the morning when the flooding hit this extreme point, dumping four months worth of rain in a matter of hours, raising the level of the Guadalupe River nearly 30 feet within just a few hours, 29 feet within 45 minutes. There are a lot of questions remaining as to what role federal cuts and Texas Republican policy have had in making this disaster so deadly.
Karoline Leavitt (audio voiceover): Unfortunately, in the wake of this once-in-a-generation natural disaster, we have seen many falsehoods pushed by Democrats such as Senator Chuck Schumer and some members of the media. Blaming President Trump for these floods is a depraved lie, and it serves no purpose during this time of national mourning.
Aronoff: I think to really understand what Leavitt is saying here, you have to look at the narrow, very limited sense in which she’s correct, which is the NWS issued timely warnings and flood watches in the lead-up to the deluge on Friday morning. But what she very obviously doesn’t mention is just how depleted the NWS, NOAA, and our entire disaster response infrastructure is. And some of these things won’t become clear for many weeks, such as the fact that Donald Trump is trying to defund FEMA, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, which plays a crucial role in both the cleanup recovery efforts for this [and] in these mitigation efforts.
Sargent: So it seems to me, Leavitt is deliberately trying to narrow the line of questioning to the point where no relevant questions are actually being asked anymore. One of the things that angered Leavitt is a New York Times piece pointing out that key local posts at the National Weather Service were unfilled at the time that it was warning of the flooding. As you pointed out, Leavitt went on to say at her briefing that NWS actually did a good job with its forecasting. But as I understand it, a key question is whether staffing shortages got in the way of adequate communication with local officials on the ground. The Democratic leader in the Senate, Chuck Schumer, wrote a letter about all this. This seems like a legit line of inquiry, no?
And as you said, [when we] widen the scope of what’s important in making sure more people don’t die in these sorts of disasters, the administration’s role becomes even clearer, right? Part of the reason people didn’t get warnings in the Hill Country is because cell phone service is really bad. It was late at night, but people don’t have good cell phone service, don’t have good internet. And the Trump administration has taken a hit at rural internet. It had rescinded a more-than-$40-billion program initiated by the Biden administration to extend broadband to rural areas. And so the wider you go with this, including all the way back to the fact that Republicans for decades have snuffed out and attacked anything called climate policy that might have prevented the conditions which made this disaster worse.… We already know that these sorts of storms in this particular area of Texas are wetter and warmer because of climate change.
Aronoff: Right, and this is a script that well predates the Trump administration. So every time there’s some weather disaster, Republicans in particular but the politicians across the political spectrum will say this isn’t a time for politics; this is the time to come together, thoughts, and prayers, etc. And we’ve already seen Republicans in particular try to pin the blame on Democrats for some reason, either for not respecting the tragedy in some way or having been responsible themselves for any deficiencies in the federal disaster response infrastructure. And this just isn’t true. If you look at Hurricane Harvey, for instance, where Trump railed against FEMA at the time, the Trump administration itself has denied FEMA reimbursement requests for parts of North Carolina that are still dealing with debris, which is blowing holes in state and local budgets. And that is true in other parts of the country [like] in Arkansas and West Virginia. We’ve seen the many ways in which this administration does not care about people who suffer from disasters, and they’ll say whatever they want to at the time to make it look good for them. But months, weeks down the line, people are going to be facing financial ruin, homelessness, real struggles to deal with the aftermath of these disasters and the Trump administration will be nowhere to be found.
Aronoff: Yeah. It’s absurd to think that we could do anything else than ask real questions about what staffing shortages mean, for instance; what cuts to FEMA mean; why the president’s disaster declarations have been so limited, even so far in Texas. These are real questions that real people deal with, and the fact is that Donald Trump and people in the Trump administration have never been on the losing end of a disaster—of a climate-fueled disaster. And they probably never will, because they’re very wealthy. And they don’t care about what happens to people who aren’t very wealthy, because they don’t meet them or talk to them unless they’re serving them at Mar-a-Lago or something. And they don’t see these people as fully human. And so they’re not going to invest any real care into what happens to the communities in Texas Hill Country, or North Carolina around Asheville, or Arkansas, who have just a different set of material concerns than they do.
Aronoff: I do. And I think it’s important to note, too, that it’s not just blue states that they ignore. So Sarah Huckabee Sanders, Trump’s former press secretary, had a disaster declaration denied in Arkansas. So we see from Arkansas to Oklahoma to West Virginia, everyone is hit by climate change. And what we’ve seen so far from the administration, and from Republicans more generally, is that they don’t particularly care what happens to people in those places, especially in the months and years that it takes to recover from a disaster and to prepare for the next one. They just don’t care what happens to people, and they have their priorities. Their priorities are funding ICE, are funding Alligator Alcatraz, are making the state more dangerous for the most vulnerable people in the country. And dealing with climate change doesn’t fit into that.
Aronoff: Yeah, that’s right. And I think they want all of the good press at the moment. They want to be shown as sending their thoughts and prayers and these verbal expressions of—I wouldn’t call it solidarity—just sympathy in the most basic, thin sense. And they aren’t particularly interested in governing a country that is really affected by climate change, not necessarily because they deny it—and plenty of Republicans do—but because they don’t want to deal with it. They don’t want to think about what it means for whole parts of the country not to be able to get insurance, for people to not be able to rebuild their communities or their homes, [for people] to not be able to pick up the pieces once disaster strikes. And I think, as I argued in the piece, that Republican rule in an era of climate crisis is a disaster basically everywhere.
Aronoff: It is a disaster in its own right, and it exacerbates the disasters that climate change is making more intense, whether that’s rainstorms like the one we saw in Texas, the heat wave that’s going to hit California later this week, fires, floods, what have you. Republican rule is a threat multiplier for the threat we already face from the climate crisis.
Aronoff: Exactly. And I think one really worrying thing about dealing with these events in a Trump administration is the politicization of what have been historically very basic functions. Most of the people who work for the NWS and NOAA—part of the Department of Commerce—are not particularly political. These are career employees, many of them small-c conservative if not Republicans in their own right, who see what they do, whether that’s weather forecasting or scientific research, as a public good, as something that is a necessity for a functional state. And many people were shocked that the Trump administration went after NOAA and went after the NWS as aggressively as they have. So I think that really is a worrying sign for the future: to see a politicization of something like a disaster declaration, which is the bare minimum that the federal government does in order to help places that are hit by hurricanes and storms and other climate-fuel disasters. I think that is a line that has been crossed already in the Trump administration, and it’s very scary to think about how that can evolve going forward.
Aronoff: Thanks for having me.
Sargent: You’ve been listening to The Daily Blast with me, your host, Greg Sargent. The Daily Blast is a New Republic podcast and is produced by Riley Fessler and the DSR Network.
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