No safe spaces in Trump's second term
The former president's promises of place-based political retribution aren't just repugnant; they make next to no sense.
Thanks so much for all the love I’ve received for Scandalized! Since I last boosted it here, we’ve had two very nifty episodes come out: one that goes way back to 1856 and the Caning of Charles Sumner, and a second, released yesterday, that follows the weird, tragic tale of former Congressman Duncan Hunter, Jr. of California; a tale that features mistresses, video games, and pet bunnies riding in airplanes.
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The cleanup and recovery from two massive hurricanes continues in Florida, Georgia, and North Carolina, and the American West continues to bounce back — as it must every year — from another rough season of wildfires. Natural disasters, aside from being tragic and life-threatening, have a long history of providing presidents, would-be presidents, and former presidents with an opportunity to showcase their leadership.
We’ve spent an excruciating amount of time in this campaign talking about which presidential candidate would be better for the economy, when history tells us that presidents themselves have very little actual control over national economic conditions.
Crisis management, on the other hand, is one of the few tasks presidents must attend to that they can actually do something about. They can show policy leadership by ably and nimbly directing FEMA and other agencies to do what they can to assist states and cities to both prepare for and clean up after a flood, a wildfire, or an insane hurricane-tornado hybrid of the sort we saw in Florida.
They can also show moral leadership by, among other things, visiting the affected areas and meeting with — and in doing so, show empathy for — the disaster’s victims.
We’ve had presidents fail at showing policy leadership in the wake of natural disasters, as President George W. Bush did leading up to and following Hurricane Katrina. We’ve also had presidents fall short on the moral leadership test, as Joe Biden arguably did with his “no comment” and tone-deaf vacation following the horrific wildfires in Hawaii last year. Policy and moral leadership really do matter, and presidents have a great deal of control over how they embody them.
This week, however, former president Donald Trump reminded us — again — that he’s determined to purposely and spectacularly fail at both if he’s elected president again in two weeks’ time.
Let’s flash back, if we must, to 2018. Donald Trump is wrapping up his second year in office, Gavin Newsom has just been elected governor of California, and an out-of-control wildfire had just devastated a huge swatch of California, displacing thousands.
While surveying the damage to one California forest with Governor Jerry Brown and Governor-Elect Newsom, Trump decided to share his previously undisclosed expertise on forest floor and wildfire management:
You have to take care of the floors, you know, the floors of the forest, very important. You look at other countries where they do it differently and it’s a whole different story. I was with the president of Finland and he said we have a, we’re a forest nation — he called it a forest nation — and they spent a lot of time on raking and cleaning and doing things and they don’t have any problem. And when it is, it’s a very small problem.
Listen, folks: I am not a forest management expert. My PhD is very much not in environmental studies or anything related to it. But I’m pretty sure this ingenious three-pronged strategy of “raking,” “cleaning,” and the ever-important “doing things” is nowhere to be found in the U.S. Forest Service guidance on wildfire management. Needless to say, experts and fact-checkers galore found this explanation questionable at best:
While forest management can be an important element in certain wildfires, Trump’s claim that forest management is solely or even largely responsible for these fires is false. Experts told us neither of the wildfires are true forest fires, and wind was a presiding factor that quickly spread the flames. Dry, hot conditions — both of which are exacerbated by climate change — made the fires possible and gave them extra life.
It might be his determination to deny the reality of climate change that keeps him so laser-focused on “clean your floors” as the silver bullet to increasingly devastating western wildfires. Whatever the reason, Trump restated this silly statement two years later in 2020 in the midst of another historic wildfire season, this time with a pointed but notable jab at California’s state government:
I see again the forest fires are starting. They’re starting again in California. I said, you gotta clean your floors, you gotta clean your forests — there are many, many years of leaves and broken trees and they’re like, like, so flammable, you touch them and it goes up. Maybe we’re just going to have to make them pay for it because they don’t listen to us.
I have to give the man credit: I absolutely adore “They’re, like, so flammable” as a turn of phrase. But I do have to take issue with his perspective on federalism — the fraught but essential co-governing relationship between states and the federal government.
Even if Trump were right about the leaves and dead trees being the main cause of forest fires (they’re not), I can’t get on board with leaving a state’s residents hanging out to dry even when their state and local government fails to address a massive problem like this. One of the whole points of the federal government is to take care of things when states can’t or won’t. I’m as theoretically in favor of local governance (most of the time) as the next guy; but Nebraska, lovely a state though it is, doesn’t have the capacity to field an army that could defend itself alone if Russia started nuking us tomorrow. Florida has a lot of taxpayers, but Helene and Milton were so destructive and deadly that it would be insane to ask them to take care of the whole thing themselves, even if they were mismanaging the crisis to begin with.
Trump famously, and foolishly, thinks international organizations like NATO and the World Health Organization are dumb because we pay more into them than other countries, even though that’s an understood part of our responsibility (and privilege) as one of the world’s superpowers. The same selfish, shortsighted way of thinking is at work here at home: that California shouldn’t get help from FEMA or other agencies because it’s too expensive, or because they don’t do enough to help themselves first.
Never mind, of course, that California ranks 49th out of 50 states in the amount of federal funds they receive as a percentage of their total state revenue — basically, how much states rely on the feds compared to how much they allocate to help themselves. I won’t even linger on the fact that 9 out of the top 10 states freeloading off the federal government supported Donald Trump in 2016: that really shouldn’t matter at all. Different states have different needs, and different economic abilities cover these costs. They shouldn’t be punished for that any more than they should be punished for happening to be situated in a high-traffic area for hurricanes.
We all live in the same country. If Idaho doesn’t want to be left out in the cold when Yellowstone blows its top one day and wipes out half our state, then we should pony up when California gets scorched by wildfires, or when Oklahoma gets tossed around by another set of tornados. In my experience, federalism usually ends up boiling down to the same underlying golden rule: When your neighbor’s house in on fire, you don’t haggle over the price of the hose.
This is all bad and callous enough of an approach to governing. More recently, though, as he runs for president for an interminable third election in a row, Trump has taken his threats against California yet another step further — and, for me, a step too far. Here’s his full quotation from a truly terrifying rally Trump held last week in Aurora, Colorado:
November 5th, 2024 will be Liberation Day in America. I'm announcing today that upon taking office, we will have an Operation Aurora at the federal level to expedite the removals of these savage gangs. And I will invoke the Alien Enemies Act of 1798. Think of that. We're going to take care of your water situation and we'll force it down his throat.
And we'll say, Gavin, if you don't do it, we're not giving you any of that fire money that we send you all the time for all the forest fires that you have. I think the bigger problem is the enemy from within… we have some very bad people. We have some sick people, radical left lunatics. And I think they're the, and it should be very easily handled by, if necessary, by National Guard, or if really necessary, by the military.
Trump’s pointed threat against Gov. Newsom and the state he runs was lost a bit in the news cycle because of the absolutely unhinged statement that came right after it about the “enemy from within.” But the two parts of the quote are more related than you might think. Because it turns out that — you should sit down, because you’re not gonna believe this — Donald Trump doesn’t actually have very strong feelings about forest floor management practices or the theories and principles of federalism.
I know, I know. He’s such a policy wonk and constitutionalist, you’d think this stuff would be right up his alley. But alas, no. Apparently, Trump’s determination to leave California to fend for itself on wildfire management is purely political, according to both common sense based on just observing the guy for years, and also to a recent report from Politico. The piece quotes Mark Harvey, a former Trump administration staffer on the National Security Council, as admitting that Trump “initially refused to approve disaster aid for California after deadly wildfires in 2018” not because of their supposedly poor forest management, but simply because California was a blue state that hadn’t voted for him in 2016, and wasn’t likely to do so again in 2020.
The situation became so dire, Harvey told Politico, that “we went as far as looking up how many votes he got in those impacted areas … to show him these are people who voted for you.” Specifically, Harvey was referring to heavily-affected Orange County, California, in which more than half a million residents supported Trump in the 2016 presidential election. That’s more than the number of people who supported him in the entire state of Idaho in that year.
The truth is that if Donald Trump is interested in conditioning disaster aid on the amount of electoral support each state gives him, he might want to consult this handy chart I made for him below. Starting from the left with the highest, it counts the total number of votes Donald Trump received in each state in the 2020 election. Blue bars represent states that Joe Biden actually won in the election; red states are ones Trump won.
I do wonder if Donald Trump would be shocked if he saw this chart (and could interpret it properly without short-circuiting), which shows that more Trump voters live in California (over 6 million) than any other individual state in the union. More people voted for Donald Trump in California, than in Kansas, Arkansas, Mississippi, Nebraska, Idaho, West Virginia, Montana, South Dakota, North Dakota, Wyoming, and Alaska combined — all states that actually won him electoral votes. Of the twelve most Trump-supporting states, only four are states that actually gave Trump votes in the Electoral College in 2020. All the others are blue states with lots and lots of folks who wanted Donald Trump to be president again in 2020. In fact, Trump got more combined votes in 2020 from states that he lost in the Electoral College (38 million), than from states that he won (36 million).
What does this all mean? That Trump’s instincts to punish states for committing the grievous act of supporting someone else for president is not only a civic and moral crime, but a truly dumb one that isn’t backed up by the numbers. If the guy who might be our 47th president is intent on conditioning state disaster aid in this way, it’d be good if he at least understood just how many of his own supporters he’s screwing over with his callousness.
In his first term, Donald Trump outed himself as both a moral and policy failure on disaster relief. His more recent comments about Newsom and California — and the broader “enemy from within” — are heinous and disqualifying by themselves. Any president with even the faultiest of moral compasses wouldn’t hold federal funds hostage as retribution for failure to support him electorally; it takes someone with no moral compass at all to do that, and that’s the kind of person we’re dealing with here.
But if, for just one paragraph, we take the selfish, coldly calculated, Machiavellian-to-the-extreme view of America and its voters that Donald Trump clearly does, we can understand why, even after learning about how many supporters he has there:
The Electoral College, as usual, is the nonsensical system that’s producing these warped incentives for Donald Trump. After all, in a system where states are empowered and incentivized to hand out electoral votes on a winner-take-all basis, why should Trump care about California Republicans? They don’t help him at all. Donald Trump is likely to get around 7 million votes in California this year; but it would make not a lick of difference in the outcome of the election if every Republican in that state stayed home and watched Netflix instead on November 5th.
Yes, we might hope that a president would choose to “be a president for all Americans” and show the least bit of compassion for his constituents regardless of where they lived, but that’s never been on the table for the 45th President. So in the absence of moral leadership, it’d be nice if we showed some Constitutional leadership and chucked the Electoral College into the dustbin of history’s bad ideas.
This election is a test of how well cynics and charlatans can capture millions of votes vs. how millions of us can open our eyes, get off our comfortable keisters and vote. Thanks for your insight and excellent writing Charlie!
Very good piece, as always! I am dismayed at Trump's lack of consistency and authenticity when it comes to maintenance of the forest floors of our nation. Where's the love? I listened to one podcast and am now onto number two. Thanks to you and Jacki!