By Michelle Goldberg
On Wednesday, five days after the official start of hurricane season in the Atlantic, Donald Trump attended what was supposed to be a meeting on storm preparedness at the Federal Emergency Management Agency headquarters. Most of the meeting was closed to the press, but The Washington Post obtained a recording.
According to The Post, Trump spoke about the coming North Korea summit meeting, polling on the midterms, the Taiwanese company Foxconn, his love of coal and his administration’s “great” popularity. He claimed that the government saved $1.6 billion on Air Force One after he got involved in negotiations. The Post reported, “Military officials have not been able to explain where Trump got such a figure.”
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Experts acknowledge that Hurricane Maria would have challenged any president. “The basic model for a FEMA response is that the state and local authorities lead, and FEMA comes in to support their recovery effort,” Jeremy Konyndyk, who headed U.S.A.I.D.’s Office of U.S. Foreign Disaster Assistance under Barack Obama, told me. In Puerto Rico, where the whole island had been devastated, that was impossible.
But it’s precisely because FEMA isn’t set up to handle situations like Puerto Rico that we needed a capable president. “When a government agency needs to do something it is not designed to do, it takes a lot of very disciplined, rigorous White House leadership” to make it happen, Konyndyk said.
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