Using natural disasters as a political cudgel has long been a hallmark of President Donald Trump’s political career.
Now Democrats are using those tactics against him.
The White House has spent the days since Texas’ deadly floods on defense, railing against “disgusting” Democrats who are highlighting the administration’s cuts to the National Weather Service. The floods were among the country’s deadliest in decades, killing more than 100 people, including at least 30 children.
The investigation into what went wrong in Texas has barely begun. But Democrats have seized on the fact that the Trump administration has shrunk the NWS workforce and is proposing deep funding cuts. The agency is down nearly 600 employees, who were either fired or encouraged to take early retirement and buyouts.
Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer has called for a probe into “delays, gaps or diminished accuracy” in the flash flooding warnings as a result of the Trump administration’s cuts to NOAA. Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-Calif.), ranking member of the House Science, Space and Technology Committee, vowed to host additional probes into the role the “administration’s reckless gutting of the federal workforce” played in Texas. And Rep. Lloyd Doggett (D-Texas) demanded more answers from NOAA because “without complete and accurate information about what really occurred last week at NWS, we cannot prevent future catastrophes.”
Experts say local NWS offices put out accurate and timely forecasts ahead of the deluge — though they warn that flood predictions could degrade if the Trump administration follows through with billions of dollars in proposed cuts to the nation’s weather research and prediction technology.
On Tuesday, Trump held a Cabinet meeting at the White House and paused in the middle to attack Schumer.
“I actually saw that stupid guy try and blame it on me and I said, ‘Man, that’s a tough one to take,’” Trump said.
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said on Monday that it was a “depraved lie” to suggest that the administration bore any responsibility for the deaths and that “it serves no purpose during this time of national mourning” to point blame.
But Trump has never wasted time casting blame when wildfires, hurricanes or floods devastate communities.
In 2023, he released a video message after wildfires in Hawaii killed more than 100 people and destroyed billions of dollars in property, falsely stating it was a “disgraceful thing that Joe Biden refuses to help.” He said the death toll was so high because the “government was not prepared.”
When Hurricane Helene hit North Carolina in late September, Trump spent the last month of his campaign spreading conspiracies and falsehoods about the Biden administration’s response. He accused former President Joe Biden of “sleeping” instead of responding to the hardships on the ground and shared conspiracy theories about disaster money going to undocumented immigrants. He also falsely said former North Carolina Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper was intentionally withholding money from Republican state residents.
Since he took office, Trump has repeatedly attacked a top political rival, Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom of California, for not reacting quickly enough to prevent the deadly Los Angeles wildfires. He claimed, falsely, that the problem would have been solved by releasing more water from reservoirs more than 100 miles away and not connected to the LA area.
The challenge for disaster response now is that both parties can see benefits for inserting politics into the government’s role for helping people, said Doug Heye, a former spokesperson for the National Republican Committee and a longtime political strategist.
“The problem is, in our political environment, there is a temptation and a reward with attention for politicizing tragic tragedies as quickly as possible,” he said.
“There are legitimate questions about National Weather Service funding and positions that have been eliminated, but legitimate questions don’t mean that we have certain answers at this point,” he said.
‘Do your job’
Trump is not the first politician to introduce politics into a disaster response, but he has dramatically accelerated partisanship around a process that was once squarely focused on helping vulnerable Americans, said Olivia Troye, who handled disaster response in the White House during Trump’s first term. Troye has since campaigned against Trump.
When the process of helping people rebuild their lives becomes a “partisan tool,” she said, “it really creates an environment where no American is truly safe.”
Trump has repeatedly threatened to withhold disaster response aid to states run by Democrats since returning to office. In his first term, Trump hesitated to send wildfire aid to California until he was shown voter rolls of Republicans in the affected area. This year, he has rallied Republicans in Congress to consider withholding relief funds to blue states unless they make policy changes, such as voting reforms, unrelated to the disaster.
“That has always been my concern with Donald Trump, is that he really introduced partisan politics into disaster relief,” Troye said. “Instead of seeing a disaster as a real crisis and being a leader in it, what we get is a president who turns a crisis into an opportunity to take a jab at his opponents.”
Two Republican governors who handled major natural disasters — former Oklahoma Gov. Frank Keating and former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie — said they benefited from giving politics a rest and focusing on bipartisan efforts to help residents suffering through their worst moments.
In an interview Tuesday, Keating recalled the unprecedented outbreak in 1999 of about 70 tornadoes that devastated Oklahoma. Three dozen people were killed and more than 500 were injured with damages in excess of $1 billion.
Keating said that his best partner in the cleanup, as well as after the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing, was then-President Bill Clinton. Clinton gave the state everything it needed as quickly as possible, Keating said. It would have been a “complete upside-down world,” he added, if the president had hesitated due to political considerations.
That’s a lesson for today, Keating said.
“To have Bill Clinton do what he did for us and have us all work together, notwithstanding political party, is the only way to handle national or man-made disasters,” he said. “And that includes Texas.”
Christie echoed that sentiment Tuesday. The response to Hurricane Sandy, which tore through New Jersey in 2012, was the “last true moment of national bipartisanship,” he said in an interview.
The hurricane hit just weeks before Election Day. Christie stopped bashing his political foe — then-President Barack Obama — and the two closely worked together to rebuild the state. Christie famously told Fox News that he didn’t give a “damn about presidential politics” when pressed by a host on why he was working with Obama. Obama easily won reelection a few weeks later, as did Christie the following year.
Christie, who ran against Trump in last year’s Republican primary election, said both parties are risking a backlash from the public if they appear to be “truly putting politics ahead of saving lives or restoring normalcy to people’s lives.”
“What the public wants more than anything else from government is to be reassured,” he said. “It is not reassuring to watch a bunch of adults play politics after people have died and other people’s lives have been turned upside down, and so my message would be really, really short, three words: Do your job.”
