Trump to Disaster Victims: Drop Dead
Sorry, but we don’t help the little people
The Mississippi flood of 1927 was one of America’s greatest natural disasters. Some 27,000 square miles were inundated, in some cases by 30 feet of water. Hundreds, maybe thousands, died — many of the victims were poor and Black, and their deaths went unrecorded. Around 700,000 people were displaced — equivalent to about 2 million people today, adjusting for population growth.
How did America respond? Initially, President Calvin Coolidge was adamantly opposed to any federal role in disaster relief, declaring that “The Government is not an insurer of its citizens against the hazard of the elements.” His refusal to provide aid was, however, deeply unpopular, and he eventually gave in to demands from Congress to deliver government aid.
Ever since that catastrophic flood, providing government aid to the victims of natural disasters has been an integral part of the American Way: federal aid to disaster victims became the norm after the Mississippi flood. Yet it was often a haphazard, uncoordinated process until 1979, when the federal response to natural disasters was consolidated under the Federal Emergency Management Agency.
Since then FEMA has become a well-established part of the American social safety net, especially in the face of worsening climate catastrophes. Americans have come to rely on FEMA as a first line of support after disasters. And when FEMA was seen to be falling down on the job, as it did after Hurricane Katrina virtually destroyed New Orleans in 2005, Americans were angry. The fact is, they want FEMA to be better, not smaller. In a July poll, only 9 percent of Americans wanted to see FEMA eliminated, and only another 10 percent wanted to see its budget cut.
Donald Trump, however, believes that he knows better than the majority of Americans. In June he announced his intention to dismantle FEMA and force the states to assume responsibility for disaster relief. While Trump publicly backed down after an intense public backlash, in practice he is gutting FEMA nonetheless. He is drastically scaling back federal emergency aid, even for communities in which the need for federal assistance is overwhelming.
The latest example of Trump’s stiffing those in need is in rural northern Michigan, where the power grid suffered severe damage from an ice storm last March. Rebuilding the power lines will cost thousands of dollars for each household served by the region’s power cooperatives. Without outside help, that cost will have to be paid by the cooperatives’ customers, a huge burden on a relatively poor part of the state. Yet FEMA has turned down the state’s request for aid, in an unprecedented break with past policies.
Adding further injury to Michiganders, who – by the way – voted to deliver the presidency to Donald Trump in 2024, the Trump administration has ordered another Michigan utility to keep an aging, unneeded, highly polluting coal-fired power plant operating, at a cost to ratepayers of $113 million so far, and ongoing at $615,000 per day.
Trump tried, unsuccessfully, to withhold wildfire aid from California unless it adopted voter ID. He has also tried to divert aid away from states that, in his view, aren’t cooperating with his immigration policies, although the courts stopped him. But the storm-hit areas that he is currently refusing to help are, or plausibly “were”, Trump country. The map on the left shows the areas covered by different Michigan electricity utilities; #3 and #7 are the utilities seeking FEMA aid. The map on the right shows the 2024 presidential vote by county, with deeper red corresponding to a higher Trump share:
Since this is not another case of Trump’s political retribution, what lies behind the denial of aid? I believe that it is a knee-jerk dominance display on Trump’s part. Whenever someone comes to him in need, whether its Volodomyr Zelensky, helpless African children dependent on USAID, or rural Michiganers, his cruelty is activated. And he likes surrounding himself with those of the same ilk: Stephen Miller, Pete Hegseth, and Kristi Noem, the secretary of homeland security, who impeded and slow-walked the emergency response to deadly Texas flooding back in July.
But that’s not all: there’s also an ideological component. The pre-Trump typical conservative argument against government aid restricted itself to programs like food stamps. The usual suspects fulminate against those who need help putting food on the table, asserting that it’s because they have chosen to be poor. In the conservative ideology of Ronald Reagan, helping the poor relieves them of individual responsibility and only makes them lazy.
But those old-time conservatives also recognized a difference between being the victim of a natural disaster and being impoverished. In their view, nobody chooses to have an ice storm or a hurricane. And helping to re-build entire communities didn’t, in their view, encourage sloth.
But that was conservatism then and this is Trumpism now. The fact is that disaster relief runs counter to the libertarian ideology embraced by tech bros like Peter Thiel. In the world of the libertarian tech broligarchy, who believe that they should be running things rather than be constrained by democracy, selfishness is a virtue. Hence they don’t believe that their tax dollars should be used to help others, even when those others are victims of circumstances beyond their control. Oh, that is, unless you are a wealthy Silicon Valley type with deposits at the failed Silicon Valley Bank. They apparently had no problem with a federal bailout of SVB.
In fact, the libertarian tech broligarchy is opposed to the very impulse to care about other people. “The fundamental weakness of Western civilization,” declared Elon Musk last March, “is empathy.”
And let’s not forget — because conservatives never do — that there’s a deeper strategy at play: if you want people to despise and hate government, you don’t want them to see the government doing anything that clearly helps people.
So American victims of natural disasters are being abandoned by Trump. That abandonment reflects his personal cruelty and that of those around him, as well as the ideological allegiance to cruelty among the libertarian tech broligarchy. And the resulting message is clear. Trump to disaster victims, wherever they live and whoever they voted for: Drop dead.
MUSICAL CODA
The Economist Who Stopped Being Polite
The New York Times made Paul Krugman famous. It also made him bland. By his last year there, every column ran through a meat grinder of editorial caution. "Extremely intrusive," he called it. Three levels of editors, all of them allergic to clarity. Everything came out soft. Balanced. Harmless. The paper of record wanted an economist who explained things without making anyone uncomfortable.
Krugman wanted to tell the truth. Those stopped being the same thing.
He left in December 2024. By year's end, nearly half a million people had followed him to Substack. They weren't paying for balance. They were paying for the Krugman the Times kept muzzling—the one who'd been right about everything and was finally done being polite about it.
The gloves came off fast.
"Trump Is Stupid, Erratic and Weak." That was a headline. His headline. Not a quote from critics. Not buried in paragraph twelve. The headline. He called the administration delusional, said Trump lives in an autocratic bubble where nobody dares tell him he's wrong because telling him he's wrong ends careers. He wrote about Trump throwing a Great Gatsby party at Mar-a-Lago during the government shutdown—champagne coupes and showgirls while 42 million Americans faced losing their food assistance. The theme was "A Little Party Never Killed Nobody." Apparently nobody at Mar-a-Lago finished the novel.
Trump fired back. Called Krugman a "Deranged BUM" on Truth Social.
Krugman added it to his bio.
That's the move. That's the whole thing right there. A Nobel laureate getting called a bum by a man who thinks tariffs are paid by foreigners, and instead of issuing a dignified statement, he updates his profile. Seventy-two years old and still knows how to throw a punch.
He earned it. He was right about Iraq—said the economic justifications were garbage and the war would be a catastrophe. Everyone who mattered ignored him. He was right. He was right about austerity after 2008—said cutting spending during a recession was malpractice dressed as fiscal responsibility. Europe tried it anyway, watched their economies flatline, and pretended they'd never heard of him. He was right about Trump in 2016, laid out exactly what would happen to institutions and norms and the basic machinery of governance. Got called hysterical. Got called partisan. Got called an elitist by people who think expertise is just snobbery with a degree.
He was right about all of it.
Twenty-five years of charts and data and careful explanation. Twenty-five years of treating bad-faith arguments like legitimate disagreement. Twenty-five years of the Times telling him to be fair to people who weren't being fair to anyone.
It didn't work. The country elected Trump anyway. Twice.
So Krugman stopped pretending.
Now he writes that the United States is no longer a functioning democracy. Says it flat, no hedging, no "critics say" weaseling. He told Public Notice there's a "high likelihood" of a growth recession, and that "the thing that's extra damaging now is the craziness." Craziness. That's a Nobel laureate's clinical assessment. Not hysteria. Diagnosis.
His critics whine that he's become partisan. As if describing reality is partisan. As if noting that tariffs cause inflation is taking sides. As if pointing out that firing inspectors general is authoritarian behavior is somehow unfair to authoritarians. They want him neutral. Neutral between truth and lies. Neutral between competence and chaos. Neutral between democracy and whatever the hell this is becoming.
He's not interested anymore.
Most people mellow into irrelevance at seventy-two. Take the emeritus title. Write careful memoirs that offend no one. Cash the speaking fees and disappear into a comfortable fog of retrospection. Krugman looked at the smoldering wreckage of everything he'd warned about and decided mellowing was complicity. The Times wanted diplomacy. Substack lets him call a bum a bum.
Turns out honesty has a market. Who knew.
The polite version didn't work. Decades of careful, measured, responsible explanation got us here—got us Trump and tariffs and a Supreme Court that thinks bribery is fine as long as you call it a gift. Politeness was just permission for the liars to keep lying.
So he stopped being polite. Added "Deranged BUM" to his bio. And kept writing.
Good for him.
Lock them up for war crimes. Hegseth must be arrested and prosecuted in international court. We cannot allow Trump and Republicans to keep killing innocents: https://democracydefender2025.substack.com/p/pete-hegseth-war-crime-venezuela