By Dan Rather | Substack
Journalist, storyteller, and lifelong reader. A Texan, by birth and by choice.
Oct 09, 2024
What’s happening right now in the warming waters of the Gulf of Mexico is extremely dangerous. The disinformation and outright lies about it — and about Hurricane Helene before it — are a disgrace.
I’ve witnessed a lot of hurricanes form in my lifetime, but never have I seen one grow from a tropical storm to a Category 5 monster in a single day. Warm waters feed hurricanes, and the current temperatures in the Gulf, usually found in mid-summer, are the hottest on record. With Hurricane Milton, we are officially in uncharted waters.
This mega-storm comes as folks who were in the path of Helene are just beginning to clean up and assess their lives. That Category 4 storm dumped so much rain that whole inland towns are gone, hundreds of miles from where the hurricane first made landfall. It could soon be a double dose of disaster when Milton strikes Florida early Wednesday.
Make that a triple dose, now that Donald Trump has decided to weigh in with nonsense that has already slowed the recovery effort. For someone who has witnessed firsthand the tragedy and human suffering in the wake of extreme weather, there is nothing more callous and heartless than interfering with a relief effort. Yet that’s exactly what the Republican presidential nominee is doing.
How bad is it? At a time when the Federal Emergency Management Administration (FEMA) should be focusing on helping victims of Helene and preparing for Milton, it is having to expend energy to battle an insidious deluge: Donald Trump’s disinformation.
I want to make sure everyone understands the distinction between misinformation, which is an unintentional omission or untruth, and disinformation, deliberately misleading information with the intent to manipulate. Though you may see the words used interchangeably, they shouldn’t be.
FEMA has had to allocate resources to set up a “Rumor Response” page on its website to battle Trump’s intentional lies. FEMA’s director says the disinformation campaign is demoralizing to aid workers.
Trump’s claims are so absurd and disgusting it is hard to imagine anyone would believe them, but just because they are objectively outrageous doesn’t mean he shouldn’t be called out. Many have said this, more than once. We have repeatedly written it in this space. But the lies and disinformation too often get ignored or down-played. Facts are too often shoved aside with the excuse that they are “old news.” But attention should be paid each and every time.
And especially now. Trump said that Joe Biden and Kamala Harris have stolen $1 billion from FEMA and are spending it on housing for “illegal migrants.” Perhaps he got the idea for this abject bunk from his own time in office when his administration moved $155 million from FEMA to pay for migrant detention centers.
Trump lied when he said Biden was refusing to help people in Republican areas and would not take calls from Republican governors in hard-hit states. You know who proved him wrong? The Republican governors in hard-hit states. These guys aren’t usually cheerleaders for the Biden-Harris administration.
Virginia Governor Glenn Youngkin said he is “incredibly appreciative of the rapid response.”
Governor Brian Kemp of Georgia told reporters he spoke with the president. “[Biden] just said, ‘Hey, what do you need?’ And I told him, you know, ‘We got what we need. We’ll work through the federal process.’ He offered that if there’s other things we need, just to call him directly.”
If you think all this sounds bad, it will only be worse if Trump is returned to the White House. Fast-forward to next hurricane season and Project 2025 has been implemented. The far-right blueprint for the next Republican administration would gut FEMA, including eliminating flood insurance. Governors would have to come up with most of the disaster relief money from their own state coffers.
Project 2025 would also disband the National Weather Service (NWS) and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), agencies responsible for predicting storms and providing forecasts. That weather app on your phone and the meteorologist on your local news? Neither would be able to provide complete weather forecasts, which they get from NWS, if Project 2025 is realized.
Project 2025 declares that NWS and NOAA are part of a “colossal operation that has become one of the main drivers of the climate change alarm industry and, as such, is harmful to future U.S. prosperity.”
Project 2025 would kneecap the ability of the federal government to respond to disasters — at a time when they are growing more intense and more frequent. Without forecasts and data, the government would be unable to future-proof our most at-risk communities.
These MAGA extremists want to put their heads in the sand and bury everyone along with them. Two weeks ago, Hurricane Helene slammed into the northern gulf coast of Florida before devastating much of the southeast up to Virginia. More than 225 people have died, while the hurricane has caused billions of dollars in property damage. Millions of Americans have been displaced, and thousands are still without electricity.
The Biden administration was quick to mobilize FEMA, whose mission is to help communities recover and rebuild after natural disasters strike. The response to Helene, the largest mobilization of people and resources in recent history, has so far provided millions of meals and millions of gallons of water, thousands of National Guardsmen and emergency response personnel to help with search-and-rescue and relief efforts, and millions of dollars in direct funds.
We can all wish we were surprised that Trump is politicizing human suffering for his own benefit. Sadly, it is on-brand for a cognitively impaired convicted felon who wants to be president in order to stay out of prison.
If the idea of Trump destroying American democracy is too amorphous for your undecided friends and family, perhaps the very concrete idea that Trump would put his rich friends’ interests and his willful ignorance about climate change above millions of American citizens in their time of need will get their attention.
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