All my life, America's leaders have encouraged us to unite in the face of disasters.
But now Trump is using them to tear us apart.
This week, if you wanted to pay attention something other than Jimmy Carter's funeral, you had two choices: the L.A. wildfires or Donald Trump's wild statements about taking over Greenland, the Panama Canal, and even Canada. Both of those stories will get attention in this week's summary (the next post), but what interested me more than either was something in the intersection: Trump's wild statements about the wildfires, and the disturbing approach he is taking to public disasters in general.
When a community faces a catastrophe, it can respond in one of two opposite ways:
- Survivors can bond together to mourn the dead, care for the injured, and rebuild. Shared pain can create new bonds across former social divisions. People untouched by the disaster may realize that only circumstance separates them from the victims, and may develop a new empathy not just for recent victims, but for the less fortunate in general. A post-disaster attitude of "We're all in this together" has a chance to grow and spread.
- The community can damage itself further by finger-pointing, scapegoating, and other forms of turning against itself.
History provides examples of both responses. On the positive side, political partisanship in the United States all but vanished after Pearl Harbor, and lapsed at least temporarily after 9-11. But on the negative side, persecution of Jews sharply increased during the Black Death in Europe, as unfounded rumors of Jews poisoning wells spread widely. All through history, disasters without an easily grasped cause have led people to seek scapegoats. Sophocles' play "Oedipus Rex" begins with a report from the Oracle of Delphi that one person's crime has brought a plague to the city. In the Biblical story of Jonah, sailors cast lots to decide who to blame for the storm that threatens to sink them.
Sometimes a community goes both ways simultaneously: At the same time the US was uniting to fight World War II, it was rounding up Japanese Americans and putting them in camps. After 9-11, President Bush put considerable effort into talking Americans out of blaming the attack on Muslims in general, though some did anyway.
Bush's rhetoric was an example of responsible leadership, which does its best to turn the community response towards positive rather than negative responses. (Using 9-11 to promote an invasion of Iraq, on the other hand, was irresponsible leadership.) Responsible post-catastrophe leadership also has several other identifiable traits:
- Unfounded rumors spread wildly after disasters, so responsible leaders set up reliable systems of information. They speak calmly and stick to facts in order to calm public panic.
- They call attention to heroes rather than villains, promoting the notion that community members should help and trust each other.
- They promote trust in the institutions set up to deal with the catastrophe, and pledge that those institutions will get the backing they need to resolve the situation.
Now look at how President-elect Trump and the right-wing media that takes its cues from him have responded to the Los Angeles wildfires. Wednesday, he posted:
One of the best and most beautiful parts of the United States of America is burning down to the ground. It's ashes, and Gavin Newscum should resign. This is all his fault!!!
And he followed up with
Governor Gavin Newscum refused to sign the water restoration declaration put before him that would have allowed millions of gallons of water, from excess rain and snow melt from the North, to flow daily into many parts of California, including the areas that are currently burning in a virtually apocalyptic way. He wanted to protect an essentially worthless fish called a smelt, by giving it less water (it didn't work!), but didn't care about the people of California. Now the ultimate price is being paid. I will demand that this incompetent governor allow beautiful, clean, fresh water to FLOW INTO CALIFORNIA! He is the blame for this. On top of it all, no water for fire hydrants, not firefighting planes. A true disaster!
and
NO WATER IN THE FIRE HYDRANTS, NO MONEY IN FEMA. THIS IS WHAT JOE BIDEN IS LEAVING ME. THANKS JOE!
Just about every sentence in these posts is false. The December bill that appropriated money to keep the government open added $29 billion to FEMA, and FEMA told CNN Wednesday that it had a $27 billion balance in its accounts.
That sum may well prove inadequate to meet the needs created by every disaster that ends up happening this year, but it's not "no money."
There were indeed some dry hydrants, but that had nothing to do with any general lack of water in Southern California, or some mythical "water restoration declaration" Newsom refused to sign. Most of the problem was a more specific lack: of water that had been pumped into tanks in the hills above LA. This created a lack of water pressure in key places, but not a regional lack of water. Shifting more water resources from Northern to Southern California would not have helped.
Firefighting planes were grounded by hurricane-level winds, not by some action of Governor Newsom.
In short, Trump spread lies in order to scapegoat Gavin Newsom, a prominent Democrat who might be his opponent when he runs for an unconstitutional third term in 2028.
Other voices on right-wing media were quick to blame DEI or whatever else they don't like.
This is all of a piece with the right-wing response to the New Orleans terrorist attack on New Years. Long after it was known that the suspect was a US citizen born in Houston, MAGA supporters were still spreading the rumor that he had crossed the border illegally two days before. This allowed them to smear undocumented immigrants while simultaneously pinning responsibility on President Biden's immigration policies.
Our media occasionally combats this scapegoating on a small scale, by fact-checking clear lies. But the larger story is going almost completely uncovered: Responsible leadership in times of crisis is a thing of the past. We can no longer expect that our leaders will take care to learn the facts before they speak, pass on reliable information, or try to prevent panic. Instead, they will tell lies that turn public fear and anger against their political enemies. Rather than use a crisis to bring people together, they will use it to create scapegoats and turn different groups of Americans against each other.
In the long run, that reversal of policy may be more destructive than fire.
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment