The following is a lightly edited transcript of the July 9 episode of the Daily Blast podcast. Listen to it here.
Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.
As of this recording, at least 109 people have been pronounced dead from the devastating floods that have pounded down on Texas for five days. Distressingly, 27 of those deaths occurred at a summer camp for girls, and the death toll continues to rise as search and rescue efforts grow more more frantic. This week, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt lashed out angrily at the news media and at Democrats for raising questions about whether any of the administration’s policies bear any blame for the disaster’s impact. But what exactly is wrong with debating the role of public policy in producing such horrible outcomes? Is that something we should debate? And when is the right time to debate it? New Republic staff writer Kate Aronoff has a new piece arguing that Democrats absolutely should talk about GOP policies and priorities at times like this, so we’re talking to Kate about the whole situation. Hey Kate, thanks for coming on.
Kate Aronoff: Thanks for having me.
Sargent: So Kate, everything that’s been reported about this disaster just boggles the mind. The suddenness of the flooding, the scale of it, the speed of it, the sheer destructiveness, in such rapid order—it’s all really hard to comprehend. There’s been a lot of debate about whether things like the staff shortages at the National Weather Service made things worse. And some focus on Trump’s promise to end the Federal Emergency Management Agency, or FEMA. You looked into this. Can you just bring us quickly up to speed on where the disaster is, and on that debate about apportioning blame?
Aronoff: Yeah. As you mentioned, over 100 people have been confirmed dead. There’s still ongoing search and rescue efforts, and there’s more rain expected for that specific area of Texas this week. And the debate about why this flood was so deadly and why the response times were so slow is ongoing. The debate at first focused on the National Weather Service. So the National Weather Service is part of NOAA, which the Trump administration has targeted for 20 percent cuts despite it already operating at a staffing deficit for many, many years. And it was Texas officials, actually, who first called out the National Weather Service and tried to pin some of the blame for this destruction on them. And what we see is that’s not right. So the National Weather Service did its job despite these federal attacks on the agency. The NWS began to issue warnings very early in the day on Thursday and then increasingly dire warnings through the evening and then until the early hours of the morning when the flooding hit this extreme point, dumping four months’ worth of rain in a matter of hours, raising the level of the Guadalupe River nearly 30 feet within just a few hours: 29 feet within 45 minutes. There are a lot of questions remaining as to what role federal cuts and Texas Republican policy have had in making this disaster so deadly.
Sargent: And they’re legit questions, but White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt is really angry at the media and Democrats for raising some of these questions. Listen to what she told reporters.
Karoline Leavitt (audio voiceover): Unfortunately, in the wake of this once-in-a-generation natural disaster, we have seen many falsehoods pushed by Democrats such as Senator Chuck Schumer and some members of the media. Blaming President Trump for these floods is a depraved lie, and it serves no purpose during this time of national mourning.
Sargent: Note that Leavitt instantly defaults to defending Donald Trump the person against the blame when a good deal of the criticism is aimed at the overall government. This really goes to show that for Trump’s underlings, everything is always aimed at the ears of the audience of one at all times, even when they’re asking us not to make Trump the subject of the story. That aside, Kate, how legitimate is her point on the substance?
Aronoff: I think to really understand what Leavitt is saying here, you have to look at the narrow, very limited sense in which she’s correct, which is the NWS issued timely warnings and flood watches in the lead-up to the deluge on Friday morning. But what she very obviously doesn’t mention is just how depleted the NWS, NOAA, and our entire disaster response infrastructure is. And some of these things won’t become clear for many weeks, such as the fact that Donald Trump is trying to defund FEMA, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, which plays a crucial role in both the cleanup recovery efforts for this [and] in these mitigation efforts.
Texas has a $54 billion backlog of flood management projects. The federal disaster response and management operates on a shoestring budget—and has for many decades. And what the Trump administration is trying to do is starve that at every level of government. Its plans for FEMA rest on rebalancing responsibilities to the state and local level. Meanwhile, cuts to FEMA are defunding the state and local capacities that might make that kind of thing possible, which every emergency management official and expert I’ve talked to says isn’t possible. It’s just not possible to replicate the specific role that FEMA plays in responding and preparing for these sorts of disasters at the local and state level because those capacities just don’t exist. And these are very specialized positions often, who have very specialized training that are difficult to replicate, especially in rural areas like Texas Hill Country.
Sargent: So it seems to me, Leavitt is deliberately trying to narrow the line of questioning to the point where no relevant questions are actually being asked anymore. One of the things that angered Leavitt is a New York Times piece pointing out that key local posts at the National Weather Service were unfilled at the time that it was warning of the flooding. As you pointed out, Leavitt went on to say at her briefing that NWS actually did a good job with its forecasting. But as I understand it, a key question is whether staffing shortages got in the way of adequate communication with local officials on the ground. The Democratic leader in the Senate, Chuck Schumer, wrote a letter about all this. This seems like a legit line of inquiry, no?
Aronoff: Absolutely. And what the administration has come back to again is talking about overall staffing levels at the local NWS offices there. But what The New York Times points out is that these are really crucial roles that are vacant. There’s a hydrologist seat, which is vacant in the San Antonio office, I believe. There is a coordinating meteorologist position who is tasked with making sure that the right people in local governments have the information to get warnings out to the public and to make sure that people know what’s there.
And as you sort of widen the scope of what’s important in making sure more people don’t die in these sorts of disasters, the administration’s role becomes even clearer, right? Part of the reason people didn’t get warnings in the Hill Country is because cell phone service is really bad. It was late at night, but people don’t have good cell phone service, don’t have good internet. And the Trump administration has taken a hit at rural internet. It had rescinded a more than $40 billion program initiated by the Biden administration to extend broadband to rural areas. And so the wider you go with this, including all the way back to the fact that Republicans for decades have snuffed out and attacked anything called climate policy that might have prevented the conditions which made this disaster worse.… We already know that these sorts of storms in this particular area of Texas are wetter and warmer because of climate change.
Sargent: I want to get to that in a second, but first, I want to read one more quote from Karoline Leavitt. Here goes: “Many Democrat elected officials are trying to turn this into a political game, and it is not. This is a national tragedy, and the administration is treating it as such.” Similarly at her briefing, Levitt called for a period of “national mourning.” Kate, I think this is revealing of a dark side of MAGA. When Trump is at risk of getting blamed, we’re supposed to treat a disaster like this as a national tragedy. It’s supposed to pull us together in solidarity. And it should, right? That’s actually right. It should do that. But this is exactly the thing that Trump and MAGA deny during other disasters. When North Carolina experienced extreme hurricane damage in 2024, Trump blamed President Biden mercilessly for the damage, making shit up with abandon and inventing deranged lies that actually impaired the response. So Trump and MAGA deny us the solidarity that we ask for at those times and then demand it at critical moments for them.
Aronoff: Right, and this is a script that well predates the Trump administration. So every time there’s some weather disaster, Republicans in particular but the politicians across the political spectrum will say this isn’t a time for politics; this is the time to come together—thoughts and prayers, etc. And we’ve already seen Republicans in particular try to pin the blame on Democrats for some reason, either for not respecting the tragedy in some way or having been responsible themselves for any deficiencies in the federal disaster response infrastructure. And this just isn’t true. If you look at Hurricane Harvey, for instance, where Trump railed against FEMA at the time, the Trump administration itself has denied FEMA reimbursement requests for parts of North Carolina that are still dealing with debris, which is blowing holes in state and local budgets. And that is true in other parts of the country [like] in Arkansas and West Virginia. We’ve seen the many ways in which this administration does not care about people who suffer from disasters, and they’ll say whatever they want to at the time to make it look good for them. But months, weeks down the line, people are going to be facing financial ruin, homelessness, real struggles to deal with the aftermath of these disasters, and the Trump administration will be nowhere to be found.
Sargent: Exactly. Just to go to your big-picture point, which you raised earlier and what you wrote about in your piece, they don’t think we should be spending a lot of federal money on disaster relief. Period. They think these functions should be defaulted to the states for all kinds of sick ideological reasons, I think. And then on top of that, they don’t believe that the federal government should be undertaking policies to limit climate change. So how is it that we’re not allowed to debate the impact that those types of big-picture priorities have in these situations? Of course, we’re going to debate it.
Aronoff: Yeah. It’s absurd to think that we could do anything else than ask real questions about what staffing shortages mean, for instance; what cuts to FEMA mean; why the president’s disaster declarations have been so limited, even so far in Texas. These are real questions that real people deal with, and the fact is that Donald Trump and people in the Trump administration have never been on the losing end of a disaster—of a climate-fueled disaster. And they probably never will because they’re very wealthy. And they don’t care about what happens to people who aren’t very wealthy because they don’t meet them or talk to them unless they’re serving them at Mar-a-Lago or something. And they don’t see these people as fully human. And so they’re not going to invest any real care into what happens to the communities in Texas Hill Country, or North Carolina around Asheville, or Arkansas, who have just a different set of material concerns than they do.
Sargent: I just find it so disgusting how they demand this national solidarity from us at the moments where they need it—but just deny it when we need it. And part of that story is the way they just treat blue America as expendable, as something that shouldn’t be really preoccupying our concern in any serious way when horrors are happening. For instance, during Covid, when blue cities, because they were more concentrated, started to develop a huge outbreak before other areas did, Trump and MAGA insinuated that these blue areas have it coming. So it’s just a form of almost greed that they demand total solicitude from us at these moments and just deny it entirely to us when we ask for it. And I just want to stress: We should actually band together and show national solidarity at these moments. But they deny that. See what I mean?
Aronoff: I do. And I think it’s important to note too, that it’s not just blue states that they ignore. So Sarah Huckabee Sanders, Trump’s former press secretary, had a disaster declaration denied in Arkansas. So we see from Arkansas to Oklahoma to West Virginia, everyone is hit by climate change. And what we’ve seen so far from the administration, and from Republicans more generally, is that they don’t particularly care what happens to people in those places, especially in the months and years that it takes to recover from a disaster and to prepare for the next one. They just don’t care what happens to people, and they have their priorities. Their priorities are funding ICE, are funding Alligator Alcatraz, are making the state more dangerous for the most vulnerable people in the country. And dealing with climate change doesn’t fit into that.
Sargent: Well, it’s interesting that you say that because they’re really very sensitive to perceptions, during this particular disaster, of failure on their part. And what I take from what you’re saying is that down the line, when the fallout from this disaster becomes really intense for lots and lots of real people in other ways [like] lost homes, lost livelihoods, those types of things—at that point, when the public attention has moved on from this, they will no longer care about it.
Aronoff: Yeah, that’s right. And I think they want all of the good press at the moment. They want to be shown as sending their thoughts and prayers and these verbal expressions of—I wouldn’t call it solidarity—just sympathy in the most basic, thin sense. And they aren’t particularly interested in governing a country that is really affected by climate change, not necessarily because they deny it—and plenty of Republicans do—but because they don’t want to deal with it. They don’t want to think about what it means for whole parts of the country not to be able to get insurance, for people to not be able to rebuild their communities or their homes, [for people] to not be able to pick up the pieces once disaster strikes. And I think, as I argued in the piece, that Republican rule in an era of climate crisis is a disaster basically everywhere.
Sargent: It is its own disaster is what you’re saying.
Aronoff: It is a disaster in its own right, and it exacerbates the disasters that climate change is making more intense, whether that’s rainstorms like the one we saw in Texas; the heat wave that’s going to hit California later this week; fires, floods, what have you. Republican rule is a threat multiplier for the threat we already face from the climate crisis.
Sargent: Just to return to this two-tiered approach that they take to the question of national solidarity, the disasters in California became an occasion for Trump to literally extort the state. And they have the nerve to turn around and lecture people for asking basic questions right now about whether the federal government is up to the task of dealing with these types of disasters. They deny us the solidarity that they ask for.
Aronoff: Exactly. And I think one really worrying thing about dealing with these events in a Trump administration is the politicization of what have been historically very basic functions. Most of the people who work for the NWS and NOAA—part of the Department of Commerce—are not particularly political. These are career employees, many of them small-c conservative, if not Republicans in their own right, who see what they do, whether that’s weather forecasting or scientific research, as a public good, as something that is a necessity for a functional state. And many people were shocked that the Trump administration went after NOAA and went after the NWS as aggressively as they have. So I think that really is a worrying sign for the future: to see a politicization of something like a disaster declaration, which is the bare minimum that the federal government does in order to help places that are hit by hurricanes and storms and other climate-fueled disasters. I think that is a line that has been crossed already in the Trump administration, and it’s very scary to think about how that can evolve going forward.
Sargent: I think on so many different levels, Karoline Leavitt’s anger at the press, her anger at Democrats over all this really exposes the dark side of MAGA in many, many different ways. Kate Aronoff, it’s really a pleasure to talk to you. Thanks so much for coming on.
Aronoff: Thanks for having me.
Sargent: You’ve been listening to The Daily Blast with me, your host, Greg Sargent. The Daily Blast is a New Republic podcast and is produced by Riley Fessler and the DSR Network.