Will Democrats Have the Courage to Blame Trump for Hurricane Deaths?

The United States dodged a bullet when Hurricane Erin veered away from its coastline. Put differently, we were lucky enough to survive another round in the game of Russian roulette that President Donald Trump is playing with our lives. But the next hurricane could be the loaded chamber. Or the one after that, and so on. On August 25, more than 180 Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) workers sounded the alarm, writing in an open letter that the Trump administration’s actions are putting us at risk of a Katrina-scale disaster. On August 26, dozens of those FEMA whistleblowers were placed on administrative leave.

When a major hurricane kills hundreds or thousands of people made vulnerable by the Trump administration’s unprecedented assault on weather forecasting and disaster planning, Democrats shouldn’t hesitate to blame those casualties on Trump, Elon Musk, and other Republican figures who are making preventable deaths inevitable. If they fail to hold Trump and his MAGA regime accountable, the president’s 2016 quip that he could “shoot somebody” and not “lose any voters” will sound even more prophetic than it already does. It sounded absurd when Trump first uttered it, and yet he keeps getting away with murder, in part due to Democrats’ self-defeating reluctance to punch fast, hard, and often.

Erin’s arrival served as a potent reminder, following a quiet June and July, that we’ve entered the peak of the Atlantic hurricane season. Meteorologists still expect a “slightly above-average probability” for major storms making landfall along the U.S. coastline and in the Caribbean for the remainder of the season, which lasts until the end of November. Just before Erin became this year’s first Atlantic hurricane, forecasters predicted 12 more named storms—including eight hurricanes, three of which were projected to be “major,” i.e., category 3 or higher—over the next few months. Historically, hurricane activity in the Atlantic basin picks up from August through mid-October. That’s the time frame when Hurricanes Katrina, Sandy, Harvey, Irma, Maria, Ida, Ian, Helene, and Milton—and many more besides—struck.

Thankfully, Erin didn’t hit the U.S. mainland, though its passage through the Caribbean knocked out electricity for nearly 150,000 people in Puerto Rico. Even as Erin remained offshore, the powerful and remarkably wide hurricane generated life-threatening surf and rip currents along the entire Eastern Seaboard, prompting storm alerts of various kinds in 15 states, from Florida to Maine. Coastal flooding was particularly severe in North Carolina and New Jersey.

Erin transformed from a tropical storm into a Category 5 hurricane in roughly 24 hours—making it one of the most rapidly intensifying cyclones ever—before eventually weakening as it moved north and east. Erin exemplifies an increasingly common kind of storm—one turbocharged by two centuries of unmitigated planet-heating pollution driven primarily by the burning of fossil fuels. The hurricane’s rapid intensification was propelled by unusually warm ocean waters, which are a consequence of rising global greenhouse gas emissions. Through their ongoing war on climate research and clean energy, Trump and congressional Republicans—bankrolled by the fossil fuel industry—have ensured that more heat-trapping gasses will be pushed into the atmosphere while fewer scientists and regulators will be around to monitor, let alone mitigate, the impacts.

We’re due for seven more hurricanes, including two big ones, over the next dozen weeks or so. That means Trump’s FEMA, which admitted internally in May that it was unprepared for hurricane season, is beefing up its disaster response capacities, right? No. Instead, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has been forcibly reassigning FEMA employees to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) in a bid to bolster Trump’s cruel push to terrorize, detain, and deport as many migrants as possible.

A federal judge recently ordered the closure of Trump’s sadistic immigration jail in the Everglades within 60 days (two cheers for environmental review!), but if a hurricane hits Florida before then, it would likely be a mass casualty event; one suspects that this is what Trump, DHS Secretary Kristi Noem, White House adviser Stephen Miller, and other fascists want. Noem’s efforts to prevent disaster aid from reaching undocumented immigrants underscores why disaster experts have long advocated for reestablishing FEMA as an independent, Cabinet-level agency free from DHS interference.

Meanwhile, the National Weather Service (NWS) has been scrambling to hire back hundreds of workers pushed out months ago by Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). These developments—really just the tip of the iceberg—epitomize the Trump administration’s utter disregard for the lives of people who will be harmed by severe weather, which is destined to grow in frequency and intensity thanks to the GOP megabill signed into law by Trump, and other reactionary White House moves.

It’s incredibly fortunate that no hurricanes have made landfall in the U.S. so far this year. That’s because the Trump administration’s wide-ranging attacks on federal and state officials’ capacity to understand, prepare for, withstand, and recover from extreme weather events have dramatically increased the likelihood of mass harm. But this serendipity is all but guaranteed to end soon, and when it does, many people will die needlessly. When that happens, will Democrats have the guts to blame Trump and his Republican accomplices?

Congressional Progressive Chair Greg Casar (D-TX) probably will. Last month, he secured an independent investigation into how Trump’s gutting of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) may have undermined the response to deadly floods in central Texas that began on July 4. Last week, Casar and Rep. Joe Neguse (D-CO) introduced bills to reverse Trump’s gutting of FEMA and NOAA, respectively. Given that Republicans control both chambers of Congress and the White House, this legislation has a near-zero chance of being enacted. However, it does offer good messaging opportunities if a critical mass of Democrats consistently raise hell about Trump’s myopic cuts—before, during, and after potential calamities.

Casar is an exception. The Democratic Party’s generalized timidity in the wake of the Trump administration’s abysmal response to the Texas flooding disaster does not inspire confidence. Democratic leaders’ hesitancy to politicize disasters—that is, to hold relevant decision-makers accountable for creating the conditions for catastrophe—was also evident last fall in Kamala Harris and Tim Walz’s refusal to connect the dots between right-wing policymaking and the devastation of Helene and Milton. This is a dynamic that has to change; for the sake of our collective future, Trump’s critics must make Republicans loyal to Trump pay a political price for routinely putting Americans in harm’s way—and prematurely ending some of our lives.

It’s impossible to overstate how much damage Trump has done in just seven months. For an in-depth exploration of the lethal consequences of the administration’s war on NOAA and FEMA, see our new report, Trump’s Homicidal Hurricane Policy.

As hurricane season kicks into full gear, the adverse impacts of the Trump administration’s mutilation of NOAA are still coming into view, but we know they will be cumulative and devastating. Last month, in its first big test, Trump’s hollowed-out FEMA failed miserably. I’m referring, of course, to the administration’s inept response to the early July floods in Central Texas, which killed more than 130 people and provided tragic confirmation that dismantling the agency is a grave mistake.

During his July 23 testimony before a House committee, Acting FEMA Director David Richardson, who waited nine days to visit Texas, called the Trump administration’s response a “model of how disasters should be handled.” Richardson’s outlandishly positive interpretation of events is diametrically opposed to the candid assessment of an on-the-ground FEMA worker, who warned that “if this is how they are going to do a major hurricane response, people are fucked.”

Democrats Should Be Ready to Pounce

Today, August 29 marks the 20th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina’s landfall. Experts warned weeks ago that Trump and Musk’s war on NOAA and FEMA has left the United States ill-prepared for another storm of that magnitude. Scores of FEMA workers raised the alarm again on August 25 and were summarily disciplined.

Let’s imagine that, sometime in the next few months, the Gulf Coast or the Atlantic Coast is hit by one massive category 5 hurricane, or perhaps the country endures two big storms back-to-back. This isn’t hard to envision; last October, Milton hammered Florida just days after Helene rocked North Carolina. Last time Trump was in the White House, in 2017, Harvey, Irma, and Maria devastated Texas, Florida, and Puerto Rico, respectively, in the span of a few weeks.

Now imagine if, as numerous communities are inundated in the wake of a hurricane, several new wildfires break out across the drought-stricken West, and another deadly heat wave envelops tens of millions of people around the country. Then the mortal consequences of ripping our already-threadbare disaster preparedness and response infrastructure to shreds will become even more painfully evident. As risks compound and failures cascade (e.g., hospitals flood and flames engulf toxic superfund sites), Trump’s madness will become even clearer. But this will only matter politically if people make a big deal of everything the Trump administration and Musk’s DOGE vandals are doing to increase the odds of preventable suffering and death.

The question is whether Democrats will capitalize on Trumpified disasters, in a way that echoes how FDR and his allies made Herbert Hoover infamous for his woefully inadequate response to the Great Depression. Sharp political rhetoric (e.g., Hoovervilles) and, more importantly, popular New Deal policies that improved people’s lives in sharp contrast to Republicans’ destructive market fundamentalist model, discredited the GOP and led to two generations of Keynesian hegemony. The task at hand requires going beyond one-off denunciations; it would entail months- or years-long campaigns to villainize specific officials and policies responsible for causing preventable suffering while offering just alternatives.

It’s worth noting that the worst-case scenario might not materialize this year. While the attacks I summarized in Trump’s Homicidal Hurricane Policy have already unleashed significant damage, the long-term consequences of his actions will become clearer over time; unfortunately, things are poised to get even worse moving forward.

Recall that Trump said he plans to “phase out” FEMA after this year’s hurricane season. An April 12 memo from then-Acting FEMA Administrator Charles Hamilton discussed how Trump could make it tougher for communities to qualify for federal disaster assistance. The memo suggested quadrupling the damage threshold a state would need to meet to qualify for public assistance, and it also recommended keeping the federal cost share for disaster recovery from surpassing 75 percent. An Urban Institute analysis found that if these proposed changes had been in effect, 71 percent of major disasters declared from 2008 to 2024 would not have qualified, and state and local governments would have missed out on $41 billion in aid. Hamilton’s “Abolish FEMA” memo, shared on March 25, outlined other ways to shrink the federal government’s role in disaster response.

Despite being directly responsible for delaying the response to the deadly Texas floods, Noem still had the gall to criticize FEMA for being “slow to respond at the federal level,” adding that “this entire agency needs to be eliminated as it exists today, and remade into a responsive agency.” But it appears that what the Trump administration has in mind is still a devolution of responsibility to state and local officials, even though only the federal government is capable of coordinating effective disaster mitigation and response efforts. It will be important to keep a close eye on the forthcoming recommendations from the FEMA review council, which is “doing Trump’s bidding” to dismantle the agency, according to Shana Udvardy, senior climate resilience policy analyst at the Union of Concerned Scientists.

The Texas flooding disaster doesn’t appear to have changed Trump’s mind about gutting NOAA. In May, OMB Director Russell Vought requested a roughly 25 percent cut to NOAA’s budget for fiscal year 2026, which begins on October 1. The White House’s proposal would wipe out nearly all of the agency’s earth system science and shutter world-class climate research offices around the country. A more detailed proposal released at the end of June shed additional light on the catastrophic scale of the Trump administration’s plans.

As meteorologist Michael Lowry explained, Trump’s budget would eliminate “all federally funded meteorological, oceanographic, and climate labs and non-profit cooperative research institutes across America.” The proposed cuts would shut down “Miami’s Atlantic Oceanographic and Meteorological Laboratory and its Hurricane Research Division, institutions responsible for most of the advancements in hurricane forecasting and science over the past 50 years,” Lowry lamented. “With the proposed shuttering of AOML, HRD, and their sister cooperative institutes starting in 2026, forecasters could lose all tools currently available to estimate and forecast hurricane intensity,” he added. “It’s a seismic blow to the arsenal of tools forecasters rely on to confidently deliver timely and accurate predictions of threatening hurricanes.”

Also on the chopping block is NOAA’s National Severe Storms Laboratory in Norman, Oklahoma. Jeff Masters pointed out that the closure of this lab, opened in 1964, would “significantly degrade our ability to improve flash flood forecasting,” meaning more calamities of the sort we saw recently in Texas.

To date, congressional appropriations committees have largely rejected the draconian cuts sought by Trump and Vought. The spending bill advanced by House lawmakers would still reduce NOAA’s budget by 6 percent, a detrimental and unnecessary blow, while the version advanced by the relevant Senate panel would fund NOAA at nearly the same level as 2025. Nevertheless, the Republican-led rescissions package that Trump signed into law last month included deleterious cuts. About $60 million in unspent money for atmospheric, climate, and weather research was rescinded at the request of the Senate Commerce Committee chaired by Ted Cruz (R-TX). In addition, thanks to GOP lawmakers, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting can no longer administer the $136 million Next Generation Warning System grant program, which helps public radio and TV stations improve their emergency alert systems to warn people of severe weather.

Moreover, the Trump administration is already achieving significant cuts by refusing to spend money that Congress approved for this fiscal year. As Science reported on August 25, “some $1 billion in spending for the current year may still be sitting on [Howard] Lutnick’s desk,” awaiting the Commerce Secretary’s approval. “The agency has no plans to spend all of that money by the fiscal year’s end on 30 September—if ever.” According to Science, the Trump administration is set to spend $100 million less on NOAA’s research arm this year than Congress intended, a 14 percent cut. Other divisions have seen similar cuts, especially those offices doing climate-related work. Meanwhile, the White House has begun canceling contracts for next-generation weather satellites that were supposed to launch next decade.

Frankly, any extreme weather disasters that happen in the foreseeable future will have Trump’s bloody fingerprints on them, so thorough and devastating has his dismantling of our disaster policy apparatus—from climate research to weather forecasting to emergency planning—been.

We live in an era of climate breakdown. Even if planet-heating pollution ceases tomorrow, the atmospheric concentration of greenhouse gases is so high that increasingly frequent and severe extreme weather is, to a certain extent, already locked-in. That said, every tenth of a degree of warming that we can avoid makes a positive difference, and so too do just adaptation initiatives. But rather than minimize hazards—through rapid decarbonization and robust investments in the social safety net, including green infrastructure—Republicans are actively aggravating an already-grim situation. Democrats aren’t talking enough about this. That’s a mistake.

This is a longstanding problem. Harris and Walz, for example, missed a golden opportunity after Helene and Milton, which occurred in the weeks leading up to the 2024 election. Trump, Musk, Hamilton, and other Republicans filled the void with lies about FEMA, sowing mistrust to gain buy-in for getting rid of the agency. We urged Harris to use the hurricanes to tell “a compelling story about the escalating and deeply intertwined climate, housing, and insurance crises that might resonate with voters of all stripes.”

That would necessarily entail denouncing fossil fuel-corrupted Republicans for obstructing a clean energy transition and thwarting investments in disaster risk reduction. It would also mean sketching, and committing to pursue, a humane agenda that prioritizes public well-being over private profit. Something like directly creating living wage jobs to achieve the universal provision of zero- or low-carbon public goods—including green social housing, clean energy, mass transit, and educational, recreational, and artistic infrastructure. That’s the kind of transformative vision that might begin to turn the tide.

Disasters offer untapped opportunities for political education and organizing. Survivors are in dire need of just responses, which includes intervening to prevent future harm. Those put off by the idea of politicking in the wake of disasters should consider that when someone like Trump White House spokesperson Karoline Leavitt or Texas Gov. Abbott (R) says that assigning blame is inappropriate, they are emulating the NRA, which insists, after dozens of schoolchildren are mowed down by someone wielding an AR-15, that it’s not the “right time” to push for gun control. Now is the right time to advocate for change. If Democrats at all levels, including state and local officials, don’t connect the dots between fossil fuel expansion, attacks on weather forecasting, and avoidable deaths when a catastrophe is at the front of people’s minds, it will fade from view and the fatal insanity will continue.

We’re not dealing with strictly “natural disasters.” That phrase obscures all of the decisions that societies make—or don’t make—before, during, and after bouts of severe weather. It conveys, in an apolitical manner, that deadly storms are inevitable, or “acts of God.” To be clear, certain environmental phenomena are inescapable, though their frequency and intensity is another matter. Still, whether natural hazards generate catastrophic outcomes depends largely on political choices about how society is organized. The Trump administration makes clear the need to denaturalize disasters—to convey the political, economic, and social forces that produce them. Today’s unnatural disasters are inseparable from planet-heating pollution and the destruction of public good-oriented government. They are neoliberal climate disasters; our future hinges on our ability to politicize them.

As long as our society fails to confront and reverse the reckless policy choices that are increasing the likelihood, scale, and unequal impacts of every hurricane, heat wave, etc., things will only get worse. Today’s tragedies—they’re really crimes perpetuated by fossil fuel executives and magnified by those who attack public goods and elevate “personal responsibility” over social solidarity—will be repeated tomorrow.

In essence, rather than adapt to our climate-changed present and future, the Trump administration is choosing to exacerbate cataclysms. To win back the working class, Democrats could try explaining how Republican policies are endangering communities around the country while making life more expensive. Anger at elites is through the roof. If Democrats want to beat back right-wing authoritarianism, which is at odds with a livable future, they should embrace green economic populism. Green New Deal policies aimed at simultaneously lowering prices and planet-wrecking emissions (e.g., decommodifying and decarbonizing housing, transportation, and other essentials) remain popular. Trying something genuinely new—not the false promise of neo-neoliberalism being promoted by corporate-backed abundance advocates—is more than worthwhile; it’s an existential necessity.

Herein lies a big problem. Without equating the two major parties, it’s undeniable that a substantial chunk of contemporary Democrats remain wedded to an “all-of-the-above” energy strategy that ultimately privileges fossil fuels. And too many of them are committed, like their Republican counterparts, to advancing the interests of a minority of super-wealthy benefactors rather than the vast majority of working people. Thus, while even corporate Democrats may be willing to condemn attacks on clean energy and cuts to NOAA and FEMA, that doesn’t mean they’ll go to bat for the ambitious pollution- and inequality-slashing policies we actually need.

One downside to focusing so intently on the culpability of Trump and other Republicans is that it overlooks systemic sources of our unjust and precarious status quo, namely five decades of largely bipartisan neoliberalization. Neoliberals from both parties have inflicted widespread pain by attacking unions, corporate taxes, the welfare state, and myriad regulations—all of which has intensified inequality and left people vulnerable and ecosystems insufficiently protected. At the same time, Trump and DOGE represent the apotheosis of neoliberalism, understood as using state power to facilitate the upward transfer of wealth. Unlike Republicans, a growing but insufficient number of Democrats are supportive of organized labor and progressive taxation and critical of deregulation, austerity, and privatization. Our call to focus on the deadly effects of Trump’s extraordinarily aggressive assault on the federal workers who keep us safe is an invitation for Democrats to abandon the neoliberal project once and for all, and to embrace a pro-labor, pro-environment, and downwardly redistributive alternative.