If the death of kids in Texas won’t wake MAGA up, nothing ever will

When Trump was first inaugurated back in 2017, I wrote with full confidence that he would “get a lot of people killed.”

Anyone with a functioning brain knew what would happen. And so it did. The Lancet, a prominent medical journal, concluded in a 2021 report Trump’s “appalling response” to the pandemic “expedited the spread of Covid. ” As a result, roughly 40 percent of the 470,000 deaths on his watch could’ve been avoided.

So why should anyone be shocked about the deaths of more than 100 people – including at least 30 children – down in the Texas Panhandle, where MAGA-imposed staff shortages at the National Weather Service impeded the crucial agency’s ability to communicate with local officials after flash flood warnings were issued?

Would fewer people be dead if MAGA termites hadn’t chewed the government woodwork, leaving key jobs vacant at local NWS offices?

Would at least some of those children still be alive if those jobs – staff hydrologist, staff forecaster, meteorologist in charge, science officer, and warning coordination meteorologist – had been filled? Those federal officials were tasked with helping local emergency managers plan for floods and evacuations.

As the Texas Observer noted over the weekend, “Federal resources for managing climate-augmented weather disasters are being wiped out, and crucial information about future risks is being destroyed or degraded.”

The key phrase is climate-augmented. It’s bad enough that the MAGA regime is wrecking the federal agencies that are tasked with saving lives. What’s even worse, going forward, is that MAGA’s mindless climate change denialism will get a lot more people killed.

If the mass drowning deaths of white Texas Christian children won’t wake MAGA up, nothing will.

I suppose we can argue whether the specific staff shortages in those local National Weather Services offices in San Angelo and San Antonia specifically exacerbated the growing Texas death toll, but let’s focus on the big picture and ask the crucial questions: Given what has happened in Texas, what lessons have the MAGAts learned? How will they plan to mitigate the inevitable disasters to come?

They won’t.

Their intentions were laid out in plain sight, evident to anyone who bothered to read the Project 2025 blueprint. It decreed the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (which includes the National Weather Service) would be dismantled and downsized. Why? Because the agency and its components form 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.” (i.e., harmful to the fossil fuel industry, to which Trump pays obeisance).

In other words, at a time when climate change is making weather crises more deadly and severe, MAGA is destroying the feds’ ability to fight back – snuffing research grants, firing scientists, killing off climate research labs, and much more. The official MAGA explanation is that such moves are necessary to cut costs. Righto. Let the grieving families bear the cost of coffins.

Care to wonder if Trump has taken any responsibility for what happened? As if. When a reporter asked him the other day whether the key weather service vacancies played any role in ratcheting up the death toll, he replied: “They didn’t. I’ll tell you, if you look at that water situation that all is and that was really the Biden set up. That was not our set up.”

Meanwhile, the Republican governor of Texas – a climate-change denier – is pleading for help from the Federal Emergency Management Agency. Naturally. Right-wing ideologues always profess to hate Big Guvmint until reality sits hard, then they pull a 180 and beg for love.

Trump is indeed sending FEMA to help with the cleanup. The sick twist, of course, is that his regime is busy wrecking FEMA. Roughly 20 percent of the federal staff has been slashed, its funding is being frozen, its disaster preparedness grants are being erased, its new director has no previous emergency management experience, and last month Trump said, “We want to wean off of FEMA, and we want to bring it down to the state level. A governor should be able to handle it,” referring to disaster cleanups. That statement is quintessentially ignorant, because devastated states are typically too overwhelmed “to handle it” – and their woes will worsen with climate change wreaking greater havoc.

So what will happen when calamity strikes again? Rest assured, some of the people currently alive and monitoring the horrific Texas news will be the next victims of a regime that cares little about protecting its own citizens and instead prefers to spend its money building gulags on American soil.

That’s my newest cinch prediction.

Is this truly what 77 million Americans voted for? Perhaps H. L. Mencken said it best, in a newspaper essay way back in 1920: “On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart’s desire at last, and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron.”

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Dick Polman, a veteran national political columnist based in Philadelphia and a Writer in Residence at the University of Pennsylvania, writes the Subject to Change newsletter. Email him at [email protected]