Vicious lies about L.A. fires expose key weakness for Trump and MAGA
Democrats shouldn't be afraid to appeal to Americans' natural sense of solidarity in the face of climate change. That's not politicization, it's how you hold a society together.
This piece was originally published at The Hot Screen.
He hasn’t even been sworn in yet, but Donald Trump is already reminding us of what a disaster his previous presidency truly was. This week, as parts of Los Angeles burn due to drought and high winds and the underlying ravages of climate change, the president elect is not urging Americans to come together to support beleaguered Angelinos, but blaming California Governor Gavin Newsom — and by extension, Californians themselves — for the firestorms wreaking havoc across the region. Though coverage from major outlets like the Washington Post might characterize this as both Trump and Newsom “injecting national politics into a growing crisis,” it’s indisputably Trump who’s trying to leverage a state crisis into an opportunity to turn Americans against each other and attack his political enemies.
Solidarity in the face of natural disaster seems to be a basic human instinct, but there have always been those who are more selfish and sociopathic than the rest of us who seek to use shared turmoil to their advantage. It may be that the sympathies aroused by seeing our fellow humans in peril are particularly repugnant to those like Trump who wish to keep us divided, and so they feel compelled to respond with a viciousness and cruelty to repress natural feelings that might prove disruptive to their divide-and-conquer political strategy.
Indeed, as Nicole Hemmer and Greg Sargent discuss on a recent Daily Blast podcast, the way that Trump and the right are using the fires as a political weapon is in keeping with a larger political strategy of trying to make people feel hopelessness and confusion about the state of the country, and to further engage in a politics of dominance. Sargent notes that Trump is, “just telling his supporters, This is what we should be doing, we should take every opportunity to try to grind blue America and non-MAGA America into the dirt.” In a similar vein, Hemmer observes that, “It’s actually this deeper fascistic strategy of “us” versus “them.” And what do you do with “them”? You punish them at every opportunity. If you have power, you use that power to protect your own and to harm others. And that is absolutely the philosophy of the Trump administration that just becomes very clear in these moments of crisis.”
The specific nature of the L.A. disaster makes the propagandizing efforts of Trump and the right particularly grotesque. There’s widespread consensus that climate change has played a key role in creating the conditions for the fires, and yet Trump and his allies are essentially using their critiques to double down on their denialism through a series of lies about California’s own culpability. With climate change as a singularly existential issue for the U.S. and the rest of the world, MAGA is responding by trying to create an alternative reality that uses evidence of climate change to deny climate change. It is a deranged strategy that speaks to the moral emptiness at the heart of this movement.
Alongside Trump’s plans to empower the fossil fuel industry and kneecap renewable energy, I’m more convinced than ever that an ecocidal and sadistic war on the planet’s natural systems is an overlooked pillar of the MAGA movement, of a piece with its overall emphasis on domination and exploitation. The inability to see the planet as anything but a dead object to exploit is the diametric opposite of the mindset needed to protect the Earth’s life-supporting systems, and we’re seeing its inherent insanity as MAGA views the California conflagrations not as a wake-up to climate action, but as a weapon to wield in order to gain still more power to despoil the planet. It’s as if people like Trump need to defy the basis of life itself to demonstrate their power and their hatred of constraint.
The Democrats’ refusal to pick a fight over the L.A. disaster (outside of Newsom’s self-defense) is yet another instance where the Democratic leadership’s fiercely myopic focus on “kitchen table” issues in appealing to voters and navigating the coming Trump years would have the party de-prioritize literal life-or-death issues. Would it really be a “distraction” to talk about the importance of fighting climate change and to vigorously challenge Trump’s easily disprovable lies when America’s second-largest city is beset by firestorms courtesy of the fossil fuel industry? Likewise, Democrats can’t fall into the trap of feeling like they don’t want to “politicize” either the tragedy or the larger issue of climate change. The practical reality is that the GOP has already politicized both, and that it is on Democrats to make the more persuasive case for decisive action on the climate and against the moral bankruptcy of climate change denial. Just as MAGA seeks to wield the L.A. fires as a weapon for bad, the Democrats should be unafraid to wield them as a rhetorical weapon for good. Unfortunately, there will be more disasters to come around which to wage these fights, and the Democrats need to be ready. They need to understand that the Republicans are on supremely weak ground when they ask Americans to deny the evidence of the actual, physical world, and that the Democrats are on the strongest possible ground when fighting to save our actual, physical world from destruction.
Trump and the GOP’s interest in converting disasters into opportunities for disunity, blame, and cruelty is not simply one more manifestation of the party’s will to power. As I noted above, and as Sargent and Hemmer delve into a bit more deeply, the solidarity that disaster evokes in people is a direct challenge to MAGA’s strategy of trying to atomize Americans into fearful, helpless individuals. As Hemmer points out, disasters remind people of the critical role of a responsive, accountable government — a role anathema to a GOP that has long sought both to reduce government’s ability to help ordinary people and to maximize its capacity to steer policy benefits to the upper reaches of the income scale. In a fundamental way, disasters remind us that solidarity — and its political enabler, democracy — are basic aspects of human nature. Progressives and liberals want to cultivate such instincts; conservatives and reactionaries want to crush them.
This makes confronting GOP insanity around climate disaster denialism even more important, as the GOP is essentially working to cover up a decisive weakness in its world view, and to deny Democrats the benefits of a decisive strength in theirs. Pull back the camera a bit more, and you can see that the conflict is over fundamental aspects of reality itself — of how the planet sustains our lives, of how carbon is heating the world, of how we consider our place on Earth and our attitude towards life itself. And at a more pragmatic level, seeking to slow climate change and its accompanying disasters doesn’t just mean protecting life in general — it means protecting the lives of those who live in our country, and keeping them as safe as possible from preventable and mitigable harms. Large parts of a great American city are burning in part due to decades upon decades of GOP obstruction on climate change; American are dying due to GOP intransigence. The Democratic Party can’t slough off its responsibility to defend our lives and our homes without forfeiting its credibility as a political party; individual Democratic politicians who can’t handle conflict over life-and-death issues should do the rest of us a favor, and retire to make way for candidates with a better grip on reality.
The Democrats might also take a lesson from ordinary human responses to disaster when developing strategies to defeat Trump and MAGA. If nothing cultivates solidarity quite like disaster, then the Democrats might want to start making a serious case that Trump himself is a disaster inflicting himself upon the American people. Recognizing our common plight and trusting our instincts towards mutual support would only hasten the day of his dark movement’s defeat.