Photo: Staci Vandagriff/Arkansas Democrat-Gazette via AP
If Donald Trump’s second administration is more radical than his first, it is also, on the merits, more competent. Destructive policy has been enacted far more quickly, White House staffers aren’t struggling nearly as much over logistics, and the men and women stocking the second Trump administration are overwhelmingly loyalists.
This has led to a new kind of chaos: Trump’s foot soldiers, and Trump himself, operating without any serious guardrails. Trump lacked the ambition — or gall — to slap blanket tariffs on the world when he first became president. What he did not quite understand at the time was that this was a blessing for his political fortunes. Had Trump tanked the stock market in 2017 like he did earlier this month, he would not have nearly defeated Joe Biden in 2020 and won a decisive victory over Kamala Harris in 2024. The economy was his calling card.
The unchecked Trump is a deeply unpopular one, barely managing a 40 percent approval rating after beginning his second term with the support of at least half of America. It’s unlikely that number ever rises much again, and the reason is policy. Beyond the economy, there’s a dark stupidity to much of what Trump does now, and this might be found most blatantly in how he’s treating the deep-red state of Arkansas.
Arkansas is governed by Sarah Huckabee Sanders, Trump’s former press secretary and still an unstinting supporter of the president. Her father, the ex–Arkansas governor, was just appointed as Trump’s ambassador to Israel. Yet despite these strong MAGA bonds, disaster survivors in Arkansas left homeless by recent tornadoes have been blocked from receiving federal recovery aid. Following an outbreak of severe storms and tornadoes that left more than 40 people dead, Trump rejected the state’s request to declare a major disaster in March, shooting down Sanders’s appeal for individual and public assistance.
Why the denial? Trump is attempting to upend how the federal government responds to disasters by foisting the responsibility onto state and local governments. Both Trump and Department of Homeland Security secretary Kristi Noem want to entirely eliminate FEMA, which spends billions each year setting up temporary housing and rebuilding after storms. FEMA funds public assistance for towns and cities after tornadoes, hurricanes, and wildfires.
The Trump administration apparently “determined that the damage from this event was not of such severity and magnitude as to be beyond the capabilities of the state, affected local governments, and voluntary agencies. Accordingly, we have determined that supplemental federal assistance is not necessary.” Missouri and Mississippi were also impacted by the tornadoes and severe storms, and it’s unclear whether they’ll also be denied FEMA assistance. In 2023, Biden granted an Arkansas disaster-declaration request following deadly tornadoes within 48 hours of the storms.
Sanders is appealing the denial from her former boss. “Arkansas will face significant challenges in assuming full responsibility and achieving an effective recovery from this event,” she wrote. “I have determined that the severity and magnitude of these storms exceed the capabilities of the state and affected local governments to respond adequately. As such, supplemental federal assistance is crucial.”
One can only wonder what is going through Sanders’s mind these days. The president she once devoted her career to is now trying to blow an enormous hole in her budget and impoverish the people who elected her. Almost no one who voted for Trump last year imagined this would be the result: a federal government in full retreat, unwilling to perform its basic and most essential duties. It is a form of radical libertarianism that Trump didn’t subscribe to all that much when he was first elected. There was no DOGE then, and the federal bureaucracy functioned adequately. FEMA still responded to storms. Trump seemed to comprehend then, on some level, that for his movement to have any future at all, his government had to provide services. It had to, in some form, show up.
Destroying FEMA is, perhaps, Trump’s most unhinged goal. There is some underlying logic to his tariffs — even if he’s done none of the work to bolster American business with any kind of industrial policy. Elon Musk’s DOGE is idiotic, but there’s always a level-headed debate to be had about making the federal government more responsive to Americans and eliminating some redundancies and waste. If Musk cared enough, he could have done that.
But there’s no good-faith argument for Trump’s attacks on FEMA. Foisting disaster response onto poorer state governments does nothing but immiserate the vulnerable people (in this case, amazingly, mostly his own voters) recovering from natural disasters. Assuming this is the new normal — FEMA, under Trump at least, abdicating the responsibility of disaster relief — Americans are going to struggle mightily over these next three and a half years. Thanks to climate change, storms are only growing in frequency and ferocity. Trump plainly does not care, and we’ll all suffer for it.
