Trump’s lies about FEMA and natural disasters could affect people’s safety

Hurricanes, heat waves, wildfires, flooding… all are natural events that have been made worse by climate change and our dependence on fossil fuels. They affect everyone but hit worse the most vulnerable among us. All these events are already more common and therefore we need to prepare ourselves, our homes, communities, towns, states, nation and the world. Not only we need to upgrade our property but also our collective essential infrastructure like electricity generating facilities, sewage and water treatment plants, hospitals, transportation hubs, tunnels and bridges, and food distribution centers. We need to work on our plans to respond to these weather events and our financial reserves to deal with the unpredictable.

As with Covid-19, we cannot predict how devastating the effects of these events will be, but we should predict how our government and our leaders will respond to them. That is a priority as we are about to elect the leaders that will lead our nation and the world in the next few years, when more of these events are expected.

Being from Puerto Rico, I have first-hand experience as I remember very vividly the disaster that Hurricanes Irma and Maria left behind in my island in 2017. I was helping to take care of my mom, who passed away from cancer a month after Hurricane Maria hit. The resources to treat her were so scarce, making an already difficult situation, unbearable.

In these moments of crises, governments and its leaders should enable help and facilitate assistance, not make a situation worse, as it was the case in Puerto Rico. You may remember the pathetic image of Donald Trump pretending to play basketball with paper towels throwing it to people in need that had just lost so much. Later on, we got to know how he was withholding the already approved FEMA and HUD funds from getting to Puerto Rico just because he had a spat with the then mayor of San Juan, the capital.

About a year after, when I was in the leadership of Sierra Club, we sued the Trump administration together with the ACLU and the Southern Border Community Coalition in Sierra Club v. Trump, because he wanted to declare a national emergency and divert funds from emergencies to build a border wall that he promised during the campaign that Mexico would pay for.

Therefore, when we read in the aftermath of Hurricanes Helene and Milton that he is spreading lies about FEMA diverting funds to help immigrants, or that it may seize people’s property if they receive funding, or that it is only favoring politically amicable states or municipalities, he is only projecting his way of thinking. And we should be very clear that the lies that he is spreading now about inefficiency of federal government is not what he would do as President, but what he has done already as President. And his MAGA allies in Congress, the Freedom Caucus, voted against a stopgap bill to replenish FEMA’s disaster relief fund as part of the budget, just the day before Helene hit the southeast states.

Americans need to elect someone that understands the complexity of the situations, who will not play games, make decisions based on political gain and spread lies about something as critical as emergency funds in times of despair and loss. We need someone in charge that is guided by empathy and compassion, that is emotionally intelligent and that has proved to work inclusively, equitably and in a bipartisan way. In this election, this is only offered by the Harris-Walz ticket.

(*) Ramón J. Cruz is a Charles and Marie Robertson Visiting Professor at Princeton School of Public and International Affairs.

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