Trump’s latest use of our
government to cover up his mistakes, this time about weather forecasting, is
revealing about the nature of his Presidency.
No government weather maps
showed Hurricane Dorian threatening Alabama. On Thursday, August 29, Trump was
briefed in the Oval Office on the Hurricane by the head of FEMA, which released
a photo of him looking at a map of where Dorian had been and where it was
headed. A white curved line showed the areas that Dorian might possibly hit. Not
Alabama.
Early Saturday morning,
August 31, the National Hurricane Center realized that Dorian was not going to
hit Florida directly, and threat projections were shifted
further east. The next morning, Sunday, at 7:51 AM Trump
tweeted the following: “In addition to Florida - South Carolina, North
Carolina, Georgia, and Alabama, will most likely be hit (much) harder than
anticipated.”
The National Weather Service’s
Birmingham office reacted in 20 minutes, tweeting
at 8:11: “Alabama will NOT see any impacts from #Dorian. We repeat, no
impacts from Hurricane #Dorian will be felt across Alabama. The system will
remain too far east.”
For Alabamans, whew. For
Trump, though, emergency – he had made a mistake. Nobody died, his tweet
perhaps scared some people, but he had been wrong, and that was impossible. At
noon on Sunday at FEMA headquarters, he
repeated that Alabama remained in the path of the storm, based on “new
information”.
As the Hurricane moved north,
doing tremendous damage but having nothing to do with Alabama, the storm in
Washington about Alabama intensified. On Monday Trump repeated his clam that
Alabama was in danger. By then, it was clear to everyone that Alabama would
remain untouched, and the controversy shifted to whether Trump was correct that
Alabama had been part of earlier forecasts. On Wednesday, Trump brought out the
map from his briefing 6 days earlier. Somewhere in the White House, a new black
Sharpie line had been added, extending Dorian’s “threat” another 100 miles west
into a corner of Alabama.
On Thursday, Rear Admiral
Peter J. Brown, Trump’s homeland security and counterterrorism adviser,
released a statement that Alabama had been in the path of the storm. Wilbur
Ross, the Secretary of Commerce who oversees NOAA and the National Weather
Service, threatened
to fire any employee who contradicted Trump. On Friday afternoon, NOAA
disavowed the Birmingham NWS office’s statement that Alabama would not be hit.
We all might soon forget this
saga of Dorian and Alabama when the next outrage emerges, but its details
display the character of our current government. Right-wing populist
politicians and parties in democratic systems across the globe are being
examined for their similarities to 20th-century fascists. Trump however is no
strongman, he commands no armed militia of followers, who brutalize opponents.
He acts more like the unelected monarchs who ruled for hundreds of years by
divine right. Trump is the state and “L’état, c’est moi,” as Louis XIV is
supposed to have said.
Trump’s equation of himself
with the state emerges in many of his statements. When the prime minister of
Denmark curtly rejected Trump’s notion of buying Greenland, he
said, “She’s not talking to me, she’s talking to the United States of
America. You don’t talk to the United States that way.”
Let’s add up some individual
instances where Trump has identified the USA with himself, made the government into
his personal servants, and claimed unprecedented powers to do whatever he
wants. As soon as he was inaugurated, he enlisted the National
Park Service to crop photos of the inauguration to pretend that his crowd
was larger than Obama’s. He ordered by tweet all US companies to stop doing
business with China. He claimed he had the right to end the Constitutional
provision of birthright citizenship by
executive order. He threatened to close our southern border with military force
to stop migrants. He deployed the
National Guard and active-duty troops to the southern border to deal with
the “emergency” that he had created.
In response to Robert Mueller’s
investigation, Trump’s lawyers created an argument that the
President cannot commit obstruction because he can do anything he wants: “the
President has exclusive authority over the ultimate conduct and disposition of
all criminal investigations and over those executive branch officials
responsible for conducting those investigations. Thus as a matter of law and
common sense, the President cannot obstruct himself or subordinates acting on
his behalf by simply exercising these inherent Constitutional powers. This led
Trump to claim that he has the “absolute right to
PARDON myself.”
King
George III said during the American Revolution that “A traitor is everyone
who does not agree with me.” Trump has often characterized his critics as
traitors: when Democrats
did not applaud his State of the Union speech in 2018; any Jews who vote
for Democrats; congressional Democrats for opposing his anti-immigration
policies. The website AXIOS counted 24
times by this past June that Trump had accused other Americans of treason.
Things didn’t turn out so
well for George III, when the American colonists decided that he did not
represent them. To prevent Trump from crowning himself King Don I, Americans
will again have to reject divine right pretensions.
Steve Hochstadt
Springbrook WI
September 10, 2019
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