The back-to-back hurricanes Helene and Milton that struck the southeast U.S. killed more than 250 people, destroyed thousands of homes, left millions without power and left a vast trail of despair. Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump made the situation much worse when he politicized the natural disaster by consciously spreading disinformation that he believed would benefit his campaign for the White House.
Trump blatantly lied when he charged that the federal government purposely stopped aid from getting to areas with Republican voters, funneled emergency aid to migrants instead of disaster response, and limited support for hurricane victims to just $750. Trump’s false statements incited threats against federal emergency response personnel by armed right- wing militia groups and hampered relief work in western North Carolina, prompting disaster workers to relocate because of safety concerns.
With the increasing frequency of extreme weather events fueled by the climate crisis, disaster preparedness and relief aid is ever more critical. So, it’s alarming to note that the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 lays out a plan to be implemented under a future Trump presidency where federal forecasting of severe storms and emergency aid given to towns and cities that suffered destruction from natural disasters, would be drastically scaled back. Between The Lines’ Scott Harris spoke with Andra Watkins, a New York Times best-selling author, who’s devoted many months researching and writing about Project 2025. Here she talks about her recent article, “What Nobody is Reporting About Project 2025 Disaster Response,” on the ways in which presidential powers could be abused in responding to future natural disasters.
ANDRA WATKINS: I was one of the first people who wrote in February about Project 2025’s plans for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, or NOAA, and the National Hurricane Center that’s within NOAA and FEMA, and the National Flood Insurance Program, and what they plan to do to gut all of those programs for disaster response and weather tracking.
In February, nobody really cared about that. But suddenly we’re in hurricane season and we’re facing these disasters and people care about it now. But now I’ve also written about it differently, as people talk about the aspects of what they would do to NOAA and FEMA and the National Flood Insurance Program, but that is all subsumed by what the president’s agenda might be for responding to disasters.
Project 2025 essentially makes the president a dictator or a king. The Supreme Court has already paved the way for making the president a dictator or a king, with their ruling on presidential immunity back in early July. So the president having a policy of responding to disasters by saying, “I’m not responding to disasters in any state that voted against me would be part of the president’s agenda and therefore, okay, under a Project 2025 government.
Similarly, the president saying, “I want to build an island around my Florida property and that of my cronies and the rest of it can sink into the sea,” would also be protected by presidential immunity that they use federal funds to do that as part of an official presidential act.
So it isn’t just a matter of what Project 2025 would do to gut these government programs.
It’s also about the power that Project 2025 gives a president to seek retribution, to seek to punish his perceived enemies with federal funding or withholding of federal funding. So I’ve written about it from both those perspectives.
SCOTT HARRIS: Thank you for that, Andra. As we’ve had Hurricanes Helene and Milton pummel and really destroy a lot of people’s lives in the southeast United States, there’s a lot of concern, number one, about how the federal government responded to that disaster. But also, we’ve had Donald Trump spreading disinformation about FEMA, about NOAA. That’s even created a problem that we’ve read about just today, where FEMA personnel had to be airlifted out of a county in North Carolina because there was information that an armed militia was actually hunting FEMA staff with the intent to injure or harm them in some way.
And this, of course, goes back to Donald Trump and his disinformation that in this case, was certainly weaponized to incite people to violence — which is certainly nothing new for Donald Trump. Comment on that, if you would, about the disinformation and hurting the federal response, as well as these armed groups’ response to Trump’s call.
ANDRA WATKINS: So we have a coalescence over the past decade or so of the white nationalist, white supremacist movement who have understood, in partnership with constitutional sheriffs’ associations in those kinds of groups, that they stand to benefit from sowing discord and distrust in the federal government because their ultimate goal is to overthrow the federal government and replace it with some sort of white supremacist government.
So that’s what you see in Rutherford County, North Carolina, happening today. A group of Proud Boys and other types of white supremacist groups have descended upon that county, much like they did a month or so ago in Springfield, Ohio, when we were talking about Haitian immigrants eating pets. So they target these communities that have some sort of upset and propagate intimidation against people who are trying to do an effective response from the government, and they try to get the people in those communities to mistrust and distrust the people who are trying to help them.
It’s a really bad marriage of those two things, when much of the leadership of the current Republican party is also parroting those views. It gives me hope that some of the Republican representatives and governors on the ground in these states and communities are actually refuting this information. But it shows how deeply embedded and ingrained it is in the MAGA right, that those kinds of disavowal don’t really break through and people still believe them.
Listen to Scott Harris’ in-depth interview with Andra Watkins (18:43) and see more articles and opinion pieces in the Related Links section of this page.
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