By Jamelle Bouie / The New York Times
Donald Trump and JD Vance are lying about the federal government’s response to Hurricane Helene.
“Kamala spent all her FEMA money, billions of dollars, on housing for illegal migrants,” Trump said at a rally in Michigan last week, telling his audience that the agency responsible for disaster response had abandoned victims of the hurricane.
“They promised $750 to American citizens who have lost everything,” Vance said at a rally in Butler, Pa., over the weekend, suggesting that the government had given only a pittance to those affected by the hurricane. In truth, the $750 was an upfront payment to help cover the immediate cost of food, water, medicine and other emergency supplies. Victims are still eligible for additional payments totaling thousands of dollars to repair damage to their homes and other personal property.
It would be easy to dismiss these lies as mere MAGA theater, but they are far more destructive than that.
First and foremost, the lying degrades the ability of the federal government to respond to the disaster. Clear lines of communication are paramount during a crisis like the one facing western North Carolina. When Trump and Vance lie about the extent of the federal response, they disrupt the flow of information with noise and interference. What’s more, to the extent that ordinary Americans take Trump and his running mate at their word, their lies may keep actual victims of the hurricane from claiming the benefits they’re entitled to. Compare this performance with that of Chris Christie, the Republican governor of New Jersey in 2012, who worked with President Barack Obama to deliver as much assistance as possible to people affected by Hurricane Sandy.
Christie, it should be said, is all but estranged from the Republican Party these days.
To step back for a moment, there are two paths you can take from this observation about the power of political lying to undermine the ability of government to do its job. One is an analysis of the ideological underpinnings of this particular set of false claims. Remember, Trump and Vance lead a political movement that is, no matter what they say, opposed at its core to the very notion of public goods and of a state that acts for the public interest. It is not a coincidence that Vance’s chief benefactor in politics is Peter Thiel, the Silicon Valley venture capitalist and vocal critic of democracy.
Instead, as Trump sees it, the goal of the state is to be a pathway for the upward redistribution of wealth to him, his friends and his allies. This is why his signature domestic policy for a potential second term — next to mass deportations and large, ruinous tariffs — is a gargantuan upper-income tax cut tailored to the wealthiest people in the country.
If Trump does not care about the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s ability to do its job, it is because both he and his allies intend to dismantle the agency (most likely to help pay for tax cuts). In the Heritage Foundation’s Mandate for Leadership — the infamous Project 2025 — a former acting deputy secretary of homeland security, Ken Cuccinelli, outlines four major changes to the agency that he would like to make during a second Trump administration: terminating FEMA grants to state, local and tribal governments; raising the threshold for FEMA assistance to disaster-stricken communities; privatizing the National Flood Insurance Program; and cutting the amount FEMA spends to assist state and local recovery efforts. Trump has disavowed Project 2025, but it remains true that key officials in his administration helped to devise the document and that Trump himself has spoken favorably of the Heritage Foundation.
The other path to take, with regard to political lying, is to focus on the decision to lie; to affirmatively act to mislead the public about a genuine crisis. Politics is not the place for perfect honesty, but some measure of truth telling is necessary to the project of collective self-government. It is incumbent on political leaders, specifically, to strive for some correspondence to reality when they make their case to the public. They set the terms of political discourse and contestation. They define the boundaries of what’s fair and what’s foul. And their words and actions affect the public at large. Ordinary people take cues from leaders when they try to decide what it means, for themselves, to be political.
When political leaders lie with abandon — when they do so flagrantly with no other concern than their most narrow interest or when they do so to attack innocent people in the service of demagoguery — they are telling their supporters that this is what it means to engage in political life. They are trying to build a culture of dishonesty that erodes trust and makes collective action all the more difficult. They are weakening the values and the virtues that facilitate republican self-government.
Democracy is a discipline. It is a habit. It must be cultivated so that we can learn to act democratically; so that it becomes a part of who we are. Part of the discipline of democracy is meeting others as equals, fellow citizens with whom you can reason and deliberate.
To lie without shame about everything — even something as dire as a natural disaster — is to show contempt for the idea that you can reason with or persuade other people. It is to attempt to shape their reality so that they can’t really disagree. It is to demand obedience to a narrative. It is to cultivate the habits of autocracy.
Whether it is Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, or native-born Americans in North Carolina, Trump and Vance are doing whatever they can to destabilize the capacity of ordinary people to trust any information that comes their way. They are asking their supporters and followers to ignore their senses, to ignore their experience, in favor of a constructed reality. They are telling the country that nothing — not the impartial judgments of trained observers nor the words of the storm victims themselves — counts as much as the story they want to tell.
As strategy goes, this could work. Trump and Vance might win the election with a message that is far more fantasy than it is reality. But whether they do or don’t triumph in the end, the damage will be done. Trump has successfully trained millions of Americans to think of the truth as an obstacle to winning power. He may not be able to capitalize on that victory. Eventually, someone will.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times, c.2024.
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