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Trump Is Incompetant

Alienware

By Alienware,
in General

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Alienware Elite Member V

Alienware

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So a couple days ago, the US federal government officially revised its estimate of the deaths caused by Hurricane Maria; for nearly year, the government has stuck by the official tally of 64 casualties, despite that assessment seeming increasingly optimistic as time passed. Three months ago, the pressure increased after Harvard published a study putting their estimate of the death toll at about 4,500-5,000. That eventually prompted the administration to finally begin revising its tally, which has only just now been increased to an estimated 2,975 people killed.

 

I am informed by reputable sources that 2,975 is a number that is significantly higher than 64.

 

In other words: the US government fucked up the response to Puerto Rico, lied about how many people died as a result of their fuckup, maintained the lie for months, and when finally forced to tell the truth, their lowest-we-can-get-away-with estimate was still half again as large as the death toll from Katrina over a decade earlier. For those whose memories do not reach back to the far-gone year of 2005, Katrina killed a "mere" two thousand people.

 

The day after this news breaks, President Trump was asked about the revised death toll, and here's his response, as per the Washington Post:

 

 

 

That's him saying - with a straight face - that a hurricane that killed at least three thousand people counts as "a fantastic job." An administrative failure that killed more US citizens than 9/11 qualifies as "a fantastic job."

 

Then he segues into blaming Puerto Rico's power infrastructure for being shitty and the hurricane for being "a tough one," because the only way he can rationalize his appalling failure is to claim that the odds were stacked against him. He can't even say "whoops!"

 

Now, there are a lot of areas where presidential incompetence can be mitigated - by expert counsel, bureaucracy, or hyper competent underlings. Disaster response is not one of those areas. For one thing, it requires foresight on the part of the executive - the ability to pay attention to briefings, correctly assess the risk, and make the necessary preparations. Supplies and vehicles need to be prepared to launch beforehand; authorizations need to be given in advance. The Trump administration did not do this. What resources they had allocated to Puerto Rico's disaster response prior to the hurricane hitting on September 20th were proven to be woefully inadequate even in the estimation of the people in charge of those resources. A day before Maria hit - by which point storm's status as a Category 5 was undeniable - only two helicopters and three planes had been pre-allocated for relief efforts, with just 500 members of the National Guard called up to assist Puerto Rico. There's a goddamn zero missing from every single one of those numbers.

 

After a disaster has struck, it is important for the people in charge to be closely monitoring the situation to see if any changes are needed and to be available in the event that time-sensitive decisions need to be made. The Trump administration did not do this. On the night of the Thursday after Hurricane Maria hit, the president departed to his golf club in Bedminster, where he stayed until Monday. The exception was a Friday-evening trip to Alabama for a rally in support of primary candidate Luther Strange, where the president did not mention Puerto Rico. That Sunday, the vice-president spoke with Puerto Rico's non-voting representative in the House; this was the only communication between the White House and a representative of Puerto Rico that happened all weekend. On Monday, five days after the storm made landfall, the White House finally sent FEMA officials and Marines to Puerto Rico. It took over a week after the storm hit before the president gave Puerto Rico a temporary exemption from the Jones Act, which was prohibiting the movement of emergency supplies to Puerto Rico.

 

The tepid nature of the administration's response stands in stark contrast to the hurricane relief efforts in Texas; within six days of Hurricane Harvey, there were seventy helicopters assigned to relief operations in Texas. It took three weeks for Puerto Rico to finally be allocated the same number of helicopters, despite the much greater need for helicopters due to the nature of the island's geography and the devastation of its roads and highways by the storm. During this time, the president picks a Twitter fight with NBA athlete Stephen Curry, blames the mayor of San Juan for her "poor leadership," and blames the severity of the hurricane on the underfunded and aging Puerto Rican electrical grid.

 

By the two-week mark after the storm's landfall, there were only 7,200 US troops deployed in Puerto Rico on recovery efforts. By comparison, just two days after the earthquake in Haiti, Obama had mobilized eight thousand troops, and 22,000 troops and 33 ships had arrived within two weeks. I want to reiterate that: President Obama sent more troops to a relief effort in Haiti - which you'll notice is not part of the US - than Trump did to Puerto Rico, and he did it faster. "America First," indeed.

 

The fact is that Trump has the instincts of a professional wrestler; any time he faces any kind of political obstacle, he goes and picks a fight with someone. He tries to turn everything into another chapter of the culture war. It's a brilliant tactic for managing bad press and firing up his supporters, but it is patently useless at disaster response. This is because Trump is a great showman and a fucking shitty president. He doesn't listen to expert advice or briefings and is disdainful of people who try to inform him about things he needs to know or who dare to tell him that he is wrong about something. Access to the President is determined by either your personal friendship with him or by your ability to get booked on cable news during a specific three-to-four hour block of the day that he spends watching television. If you're in Washington and Trump's at one of his resorts for the weekend - which, for Trump, appears to start on Thursday - you can give up on getting his attention until Monday; until then, he'll only be listening to the people physically at the resort with him and to whatever's on TV.

 

The man is simply not qualified for the demands of the position he was elected to. This was suspected long before he took office, but Puerto Rico confirms it with devastating clarity. Having an entertaining buffoon for a president can be tolerated so long as the economy is chugging along nicely and there aren't any sudden disasters. But as soon as this administration is put in a position where decisive action and careful foresight are needed in equal quantities, it fucking implodes on itself, because the lynchpin of the whole operation is a reality TV star and billionaire who has never been more than fifteen seconds away from a Diet Coke in his entire life.

 

In conclusion, some numbers:

 

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