Climate Disasters Are Catnip for Cynical Republicans
Days after flooding in the Texas Hill Country killed 27 campers and counselors at Camp Mystic—just a portion of the more than 100 already confirmed dead in Central Texas—Immigration and Customs Enforcement shut down a children’s summer camp in Los Angeles’s McArthur Park. The raid is part of Homeland Security advisor Stephen Miller’s plan to flood the city with armored vehicles, drones, and ICE agents dressed for war, who’ve been kidnapping people from street corners, restaurants, and convenience stores.
Neither of these floods, or the destruction they’ve caused, should be understood as acts of God. While subsequent studies will be needed to determine the specific impact rising temperatures might have had on holiday weekend rain in Texas, researchers have already found that climate change has made those particular types of storms in that particular part of the country both wetter and warmer. The White House’s quest to destroy the Federal Emergency Management Agency will make recovery even more of a painful slog than it would have been otherwise. Republicans, for their part, haven’t shied away from comparing their plans—for FEMA, the administrative state, immigrants and much more—to a deluge. “All we have to do is flood the zone,” former Trump advisor Steve Bannon famously told PBS in 2019. “Every day, we hit them with three things. They’ll bite on one, and we’ll get all of our stuff done, bang, bang, bang. These guys will never be able to recover, but we got to start with muzzle velocities.”
Although climate change has fallen out of political debates in the United States over the last few years, rising temperatures have been delivering destruction with muzzle velocity across the country. The Trump administration kicked off as wildfires in Los Angeles devastated homes from Malibu to Altadena. ICE agents prowling the streets of Southern California will find their balaclavas increasingly sweat-soaked as they contend with a brutal heat wave forecast to send temperatures into the triple digits. The National Weather Service is currently predicting severe thunderstorms across the Mid-Atlantic and Great Plains, elevated fire risk in the West, and flash flooding in parts of Virginia and North Carolina, where workers are still picking up debris after Hurricane Harvey destroyed the myth that Asheville would be a “climate haven.” Bang, bang, bang.
The climate crisis is every bit as disorienting as Bannon hoped the second Trump administration would be to its enemies, and those two crises compliment one another. Republicans don’t have any real answers to climate-fueled destruction, of course; whether by way of Supreme Court rulings or the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, the right is actively destroying what modest progress the U.S. has made toward reducing its emissions. For the GOP, climate-fueled disasters are just another source of chaos they can exploit to argue against the inefficiencies of government overreach, and in favor of restoring law and order with boots on the ground. Stephen Miller and Steve Bannon are realizing their most ghoulish, transformative fantasies as the climate crisis their party has spent decades denying plays out in real-time. Continuing to avoid the subject won’t help defeat them. But climate politics in the era of Trump 2.0 ought to abandon its reliance on feel-good, far-off promises, and reckon with the actually existing nature of the climate crisis in the United States: a deadly, expensive mess being supercharged by the right.
