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Opinion
Trump and Texas Republicans Show How Not to Prepare for the Climate Crisis
However, NWS provided accurate forecasts and warnings despite everything that Trump and Elon Musk’s DOGE wrecking crew have been doing to impair the agency.
We sorely need a return to the Rooseveltian ideal of big government that works for working people, including by phasing out the fossil fuel industry and protecting us from increasingly frequent and severe storms, heatwaves, and wildfires.
That’s not to suggest that the Trump administration’s ill-advised cuts to the federal forecasting apparatus couldn’t have contributed to lethal havoc on the ground. Local NWS offices were missing key officials, which may have undermined swift and cohesive coordination between forecasters and local emergency managers.
Tom Fahy, the legislative director for the National Weather Service Employees Organization (the union representing NWS workers), told The New York Times that the agency’s San Angelo office, which covers many of the hardest-hit areas, was missing a senior hydrologist, staff forecaster, and a meteorologist-in-charge.
The nearby NWS office in San Antonio “also had significant vacancies, including a warning coordination meteorologist and science officer,” the Times reported. “Staff members in those positions are meant to work with local emergency managers to plan for floods, including when and how to warn local residents and help them evacuate.” The warning coordination meteorologist reportedly left on April 30, accepting the Trump administration’s early retirement offer. This runs counter to Trump’s weekend claim that his policies didn’t lead to vacancies.
In early May, CNN reported that 30 of NWS’ 122 weather forecast offices around the country were missing a meteorologist-in-charge. Former and current agency personnel made clear that the absence of chief meteorologists and other leaders could jeopardize timely communications between forecasters, the media, and local emergency managers.
Texas Officials Compounded Trump’s Recklessness
Making matters worse, Texas lawmakers earlier this year refused to pass a bill that would have improved local disaster warning systems. Rob Kelly, the top elected official in Kerr County, the flood-prone jurisdiction where most of the deaths have occurred, said that officials considered installing a warning system years ago but declined due to the purportedly high cost.
In the aftermath of increasingly common climate disasters, it becomes clear why, when someone asserts that investments in risk reduction are “expensive,” the response should be, “compared with what?”
According to The Guardian, “Questions are also being asked” about whether Kerr County officials “had approved development along the river bank that may have skirted rules issued by the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) that control where homes may be built in areas vulnerable to flooding.”
It should be noted here that advocates of the so-called abundance agenda, which we have warned is an attempt to launder unpopular neoliberal policies, have repeatedly held up Texas as a model to be emulated, implying that circumventing environmental regulations to build more housing is sound policy.
Similar Disasters Are Coming. Trump Must Be Held Accountable
Amid the flooding on July 4, Trump signed into law the GOP’s budget reconciliation bill, which will curtail clean energy and expand the fossil fuel combustion that supercharges extreme weather. A few days earlier, the Trump administration submitted a budget request to Congress that would eliminate all climate research at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), the parent agency of NWS.
On July 5, Trump approved Texas Gov. Greg Abbott’s (R) request for a major disaster declaration. While it remains to be seen, the federal response could be hobbled due to Trump and Musk’s ongoing war on FEMA.
In short, the Trump administration is simultaneously exacerbating climate change and eroding society’s ability to understand, prepare for, and respond to it. This is precisely the opposite of what should be happening right now.
The deadly Texas floods will not be the last manifestation of extreme weather turbocharged by fossil fuel pollution. In an era of escalating climate threats, we need a stronger public sector with more resources to mitigate risks, help people weather storms, and adapt for the future.
For too long, neoliberal Democrats have joined Republicans in bashing the government and calling for deregulation, austerity, and privatization. In February, Matthew Yglesias went so far as to encourage Democrats to “channel their inner DOGE,” portraying party elites’ abandonment of FDR’s New Deal politics—from Jimmy Carter to Bill Clinton to Barack Obama—as a step in the right direction.
In fact, we sorely need a return to the Rooseveltian ideal of big government that works for working people, including by phasing out the fossil fuel industry and protecting us from increasingly frequent and severe storms, heatwaves, and wildfires.
In the meantime, congressional Democrats must not neglect their oversight duties. They ought to launch investigations and ruthlessly question the Trump administration’s culpability in the Texas flooding disaster.
Who Will Trump Disappear From History Next?
Identified from a database obtained by The Associated Press, the targeted subjects included Brooklyn Dodgers baseball star Jackie Robinson, pictured during his Army service before becoming the first Black to reach the major leagues in 1947; the Tuskegee Airmen, who were the nation’s first Black military pilots during World War II; and the Navajo Code Talkers, a Native American Marine Corps unit who used their tribal language on the radio for top-secret communications during the war against Japan. Other banned photos showed women who broke significant gender barriers like Major Lisa Jaster, the first woman to graduate from the Army’s Ranger School, and Colonel Jeannie Leavitt, the Air Force’s first female fighter pilot.
It’s clearly far too soon to suggest that Americans are headed for an era of repression comparable in any way to those in Stalin’s Soviet Union or post-Mao China. It’s not too early, however, to be conscious of that possibility.
Also deleted were multiple pictures of the Enola Gay, the B-29 bomber (named for the pilot’s mother) that dropped the first atomic bomb on Hiroshima in 1945. That was thanks to an artificial intelligence technique in which computers searched government websites for a list of keywords indicating possibly unacceptable content and inserted “DEI” into the web addresses where any of those words were found, flagging them for removal. For obvious reasons, “gay” was on the banned-word list and, with no human eyes to spot the context, the Enola Gay photos were excised. Some of those photos were fairly quickly reposted, along with other images whose removal had drawn criticism—photographs of the Code Talkers, for example. But thousands of photos were kept offline, making it clear that the basic goal of that purge, the intent to revise history and erase truths and realities that the Trumpists believe challenge their ideology, remains unchanged.
Reading the Post roundup and other articles on the subject reminded me of an event that, while not identical, was similar in meaningful ways to the Trump team’s chainsaw assault on the Pentagon photo archives. It, however, took place in a very different time and setting—nearly 49 years ago, on the other side of the Pacific Ocean. I was then a journalist in Hong Kong, covering stories in China and elsewhere in Asia. Several years into that assignment, in September 1976, China’s longtime Communist ruler, Mao Zedong, died in Beijing. Less than a month later, in early October, his successors arrested his widow, Jiang Qing, and her three principal associates, now condemned as counterrevolutionary criminals for their leading roles in Mao’s catastrophic Cultural Revolution.
Only weeks earlier, hundreds of millions of Chinese and other readers around the world had seen photographs in the Chinese communist newspaper, the People’s Daily, and other official media showing all four sitting in the front row of mourners at Mao’s funeral. After they were arrested, Chinese publications continued to carry those photos—but with Jiang and her three allies, now labeled the “Gang of Four,” airbrushed out. The editing was anything but subtle: Blurred smudges or blank spots appeared where they had been in the originals, while their names in the captions were blotted out by vertical rows of X’s.
Though I haven’t found copies of those memorable images, an online search turned up a different set of before-and-after shots without the smudges and blotted-out captions I remember but with equally obvious gaps where each of the four had been standing when the photo was taken.
The technology in that now-distant era was different, but the Communist Party officials who doctored those photographs were acting in the same way and for the same reasons that motivated President Donald Trump’s minions nearly a half-century later, when they eliminated those supposedly DEI-related images and descriptions from the Pentagon archives. Both intended to wipe out any evidence that conflicted with the preferred (and often wildly false) historical narratives propagated by their rulers. Both sought to obliterate visual records that might have raised uncomfortable questions about the political messaging of their leaders and the policies and underlying values they reflected. Both were entirely ready and willing to disregard truth and deny reality in order to protect falsehoods their bosses wanted people to believe.
I have no way of knowing what, if anything, President Trump or Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth or their censors might know about that earlier example—or anything else about Mao, for that matter, or if any of them have ever even heard of Jiang Qing or the Gang of Four. It’s likely that, like most Americans, they know little or nothing about that now-distant Chinese past. It’s more than likely that they’ve never even heard the name Jiang Qing or the label Gang of Four. Still, the parallels are a chilling reminder that, in democracies as well as in communist dictatorships, the people in power are often more committed to maintaining that power than to any obligation to tell the truth.
Another Alarming Precedent
I had another first-hand encounter with airbrushed history some years later on a short visit to the other 20th-century communist superpower. That glimpse came during a university-sponsored study tour to the Russian Far East in the summer of 1990, just a year and a half before the final breakup of the Soviet Union. In the decades preceding our trip, the Soviet authorities had preserved the communist structures of government, while continuing to proclaim Marxist-Leninist ideology. They had, however, repudiated the brutal legacy of Joseph Stalin’s rule, which ended with his death in 1953. Consistent with that shift in official thinking was an exhibit at the Vladimir K. Arseniev Museum in the far eastern Russian city of Vladivostok (named for an explorer and naturalist who had been a pioneer in that once remote region), which I visited twice while there. The exhibit, which had been installed just a year before our trip, offered a remarkable display of artworks and relics that recalled the terror of the Stalin era.
On my first visit to the museum, accompanied by two students from the local university hosting our tour, I walked through the Stalin exhibit with Irina Yatskova, a brisk, forthright woman who was the chief of the museum’s Soviet history department. Irina was also co-chair of the provincial branch of the Memorial Committee, a nationwide organization seeking redress for victims of the terror campaigns of the Stalin era. Over the doorway where we entered the gallery, strands of barbed wire hung between bare boards. They were meant to represent the gates outside the entrance to one of the concentration camps of that era. Inside, one wall was covered with photos from the Stalin years, images of smiling workers or grateful peasants thanking the Soviet ruler for their supposedly happy lives. In front of that display stood a huge blown-up photo of Stalin himself, circled by a ring of inscriptions reproducing the worshipful titles he was customarily accorded during his years in power—“creator of happiness and friendship,” “leader and teacher of the Communist Party,” and dozens more in the same vein.
If Trump and Elon Musk don’t resolve their feud, will we see censors combing the White House archives for photos showing them together and reissuing them with Musk’s image airbrushed out?
On another wall, a stylized map showed the route by which prisoners were transported to concentration camps scattered across the Soviet Arctic—a journey that began on the Trans-Siberian railroad from the Russian heartland to Vladivostok and then by ship for another 1,400 miles across the Sea of Okhotsk to Magadan, the gateway to Russia’s vast frozen northern region. A row of display cases in front of the map contained bits of memorabilia: prisoners’ ID cards, photographs, a few letters, and two shriveled roses tied with a red ribbon—brought there by a former prisoner’s daughter, Irina told me. There was also a panel listing the names of prominent victims of Stalin’s terror, including many of the top leaders of the 1917 Bolshevik revolution who were later exiled, imprisoned, or executed as Stalin eliminated possible rivals for power.
There was, however, a glaring omission from that list. The name of Leon Trotsky, by far the most prominent of the old Bolsheviks who had fallen out of favor under Stalin’s rule, wasn’t on that panel. And Trotsky was similarly missing from a display in a different exhibit, dating from a previous era and reflecting an earlier version of ideological orthodoxy. Focused on the original Soviet leader, Vladimir Lenin, portrayed in the heroic style traditional in past official propaganda, the exhibit included many photos from 1917 and the following years of civil war between the Bolsheviks and their enemies. None of them, however, showed Trotsky, even though he was at the time a highly visible revolutionary leader, second only to Lenin himself. When I mentioned that to Svetlana Soboleva, one of the teachers hosting our group who accompanied me on a second visit to the museum a few days later, she replied with a question of her own: How did I know Trotsky wasn’t in the photos, since the captions were in Cyrillic script, which at the time I couldn’t read? I knew because I would recognize Trotsky if I saw him, I replied, and I hadn’t seen him in any of the pictures.
Svetlana looked at me in surprise. “I’ve never seen a photograph of Trotsky!” she said. I was startled—and puzzled. If Stalin’s other high-ranking victims had indeed been officially rehabilitated and their images restored to public view, why, I wondered, was Trotsky still a non-person?
I must have asked that question at the time, but I don’t remember how I framed it, or how she answered. Now, relevant details are easy to find on the Internet—for instance, on a page at the Rare Historical Photos site, which notes that, after sending Trotsky into exile, Stalin ordered him “eliminated from all photos.” His censors also erased other rivals or potential rivals, as strikingly shown in a spread of four successive copies of the same Stalin photo. The original print, from 1926, has him standing with three contemporaries; in three subsequent versions each of them would be deleted, one at a time.
A different web page on the same topic, posted on the HistoryNet site, carries the apt subheadline: “Was Stalin the forefather of Photoshop?”
Where Will Trump’s Censors Turn Next?
It’s hard not to see a straight line between Stalin’s version of photoshopping and the purge of the Pentagon archives in 2025, though it’s equally important not to overstate the connection. The United States today in no way resembles the Soviet Union of the 1930s, or China at the time of Mao’s death (or today). The communist regimes had no safeguards against official abuses of power; America’s political and legal systems have many. The rule of law, a functioning structure of government by elected representatives, and independent news media constitutionally protected from official repression, all continue to defend the basic rights of citizens and other residents, and still attempt to defend truth in the face of official distortions. It’s clearly far too soon to suggest that Americans are headed for an era of repression comparable in any way to those in Stalin’s Soviet Union or post-Mao China. It’s not too early, however, to be conscious of that possibility, a thought that would never have crossed my mind before witnessing the opening months of Donald Trump’s second term in the White House.
Writing this essay, I found myself wondering where his photoshoppers might go from here. Months or years from now, whose names and visual images might they seek to erase from the visual and written record of our history? If Trump and Elon Musk don’t resolve their feud, will we see censors combing the White House archives for photos showing them together and reissuing them with Musk’s image airbrushed out? Obviously, that’s not a serious thought at this point. But it is one that would never have occurred to me, had the Pentagon files not recently undergone that photo purge. Am I 100% certain that this will never happen? Or will I (and the rest of us) just have to wait and see?
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