“No! They voted for this to happen,” a donor wrote in response to our call to give cash relief to Texas flood survivors.
Normally, my organization GiveDirectly receives donations, not anger, when we respond to disasters. But this week, after at least 120 people, many of them children, died in the Texas floods, we’ve been inundated with messages implying that the victims had brought this on themselves by helping elect Donald Trump and that the politics of the state should dictate the response.
“Future Trump voters. Oh well.” “Go ask Elon for help.” “Are you Texans feeling that you voted for the right man?” A longtime donor said our Texas response has “shattered” their image of our work.
This has played out on social platforms as well, prompting some liberal commentators to speak out against the dehumanization of Texas communities. Political trolling online is nothing new, but its spillover into blaming victims and survivors of disaster is a dangerous new low.
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Our support for low-income families impacted by January’s L.A. wildfires received a positive response. There were no bitter comments blaming liberal forest-management policies. We simply offered aid, and people gave generously.
The contrast with Texas is disturbing. Yesterday we had to stop promoting our online ads as the comments below a photo of a Kerr County flood survivor filled up with sentiments of “they deserved it” and “thoughts and prayers — well, not really.”
As Nina Turner, a former national co-chair for Bernie Sanders, replied to a now-deleted viral post blaming the Texas victims for their own suffering: “It takes a serious lack of humanity to see children die in a natural disaster and respond with something along the lines of ‘that’s what they voted for.’”
Aid organizations are nonpartisan so we hesitate to weigh in given the current political climate. But as we are in the business of helping people, we have to speak out against a troubling trend: American disaster relief is being politicized, and with it, our shared humanity is at risk.
We saw the effects of this polarization from the other side when responding to Hurricane Helene in North Carolina last year. Some survivors refused federal aid, fearing that FEMA agents were part of a political conspiracy. In one county, responders paused operations after reports of an armed militia “hunting FEMA” turned out to be credible enough that responders had to evacuate.
It’s fair to disagree with policy decisions and believe those decisions leave communities exposed. The Trump Administration slashed FEMA and USAID, and disaster declarations are increasingly wielded as political tools.
But you can hold that truth and still feel empathy for the families who lost everything. Anger at a broken system should never cancel out compassion for the people caught in its collapse.
In fact, the cracks in that system are why nonprofits like ours now play an outsize role in disaster response. FEMA itself has said it can’t act alone, relying on local groups, volunteers, and mutual aid to reach those in need. Our response as citizens cannot mirror the dysfunction at the top. It cannot become, “I only help those who voted like me.”
We should all be alarmed if liberals donate to only blue-state relief and conservatives support only red-state relief. Such behavior is deeply corrosive. It suggests that our compassion is conditional. That our help is earned only by ideological alignment. It’s a slippery slope, and one that undermines both disaster recovery and the social fabric it depends on.
To those wondering if Texans, who Trump quickly promised would receive federal aid, should receive donations at all: nonprofits like ours help reach those missed by or awaiting FEMA’s cash aid that will take a month or more to reach them. This week, we’re paying impacted families already on food stamps, living paycheck to paycheck. Many had no flood insurance. Some have no permanent home now so they may be missed by government aid. Three-quarters of the low-income L.A. families we reached said ours was the only support they received.
Floods and fires don’t check party registration before they destroy a home. Aid groups will continue sending emergency cash to families in Texas just as we’ve done for other disasters, agnostic to how the victims vote.
And we hope, sincerely, that Americans of all backgrounds and beliefs will choose to respond with empathy rather than enmity.
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