Donald Trump is screwing up his Hurricane Harvey response in ways that only he could
It’s official: Donald Trump has screwed up his response to Hurricane Harvey and its aftermath just as thoroughly as one might have expected. His federal response has been so lacking that people in Houston are resorting to using their own private boats to rescue each other from the flooding (link). But Trump is also screwing this up in other ways that only he could.
George W. Bush screwed up his response to Hurricane Katrina because he had put his personal cronies into key government positions who lacked the competence to deal with the aftermath. But Donald Trump has done something even worse: he’s failed to staff the government at all. He finally got around to appointing a FEMA Director in June, after having gone five months without filling the position. But Trump’s real problem is that he’s failed to staff the federal government in general, with more than eighty percent of appointed positions still vacant, and so FEMA is likely just as much of an understaffed shell as any other federal agency in the Trump era. But it gets worse.
It’s not enough that Trump has failed to send adequate help to Texas, it’s that he’s instead spending his time touting lies about the help he’s supposedly sent, and wildly inappropriate statements about other topics. On a weekend in which at least five people have died in the post-hurricane flooding, Trump has been tweeting about how everyone should buy his friend’s book, and how much he hates a particular Democratic Senator.
Meanwhile, Donald Trump keeps boasting about his own hurricane response by tweeting things like “Great coordination between agencies at all levels of government. Continuing rains and flash floods are being dealt with.” Try telling that to the private citizens in Texas who have resorted to using their own boats to try to rescue each other.
