Dumb Blue States Should Have Voted Trump If They Were Going To Have Weather Emergencies
Suck it, losers.
Hello there! Do you live in a blue state? Was that blue state recently hit by a natural disaster so huge that it overwhelmed any preparations the state had made? Maybe there was a particularly violent rainstorm that caused flooding, or a blizzard that dumped apocalyptic amounts of snow on you that you spent days digging out from under. Sure, you got some funny videos of dogs trying to get out of the house to poop, only to be confronted with near-Himalayan conditions that both excited and confused their shallot-sized brains. But mostly, it really sucked.
Maybe your state leaders realized that they lacked the resources to keep up with this unfolding disaster. So they appealed to the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) for some financial assistance to help cover the costs of snow removal or cleaning up the mountains of mud left behind when the waters finally receded. You jumped through whatever hoops you had to jump, and FEMA approved the aid.
All that remained was for President Donald Trump to sign off. But you are a blue state, so fuck you.
A couple of weeks ago, Trump denied $227 million in aid to New York, New Jersey, Massachusetts, and Rhode Island that the states had requested to help clean up from February’s record snowstorm. Politico has now gotten hold of some emails showing that while regional FEMA and NOAA offices determined those states met certain government thresholds for aid, the giant baby overrode the determinations for no obvious reason.
Well, there was a reason, and it was that when the aid request landed on his desk, his dementia-addled brain spit out something like BLUE STATE THEY DON’T LOVE TRUMP THEY CAN HAVE MONEY WHEN THEY LOVE TRUMP WHERE DIET COKE I PUSH DIET COKE BUTTON WHEN DIET COKE GET HERE, and you were shit out of luck.
This almost never happens. Presidents this century have approved 69 requests (nice) for “snow assistance that met FEMA standards.” A former FEMA official told Politico they could not remember a time when such a disaster declaration was denied.
Even Trump in his first term didn’t deny disaster requests — or rather, not at the rate he’s denying them now. It’s amazing how much worse he is in his second term, when his first term was a hideous clusterfuck unmatched in American history. It turns out, we still hadn’t touched bottom.
If you ask the White House about the disaster relief, they make it sound like your state is full of moochers who should have been prepared for an amount of snowfall that hasn’t been seen in the roughly century and a half that records have been kept:
“There is no politicization to the President’s decisions on disaster relief,” White House spokesperson Abigail Jackson said in a statement. Trump handles disaster requests “with great care” to ensure state aid is used “to supplement — not substitute, their obligation to respond to and recover from disasters.”
Meanwhile, Trump has approved 90 percent of the aid requests he’s received from red states. Sorry, mid-Atlantic and New England regions, you should have elected Republicans if you wanted help digging out of the snow.
And it is not just disaster relief requests. The administration is being sued by a bunch of researchers whose grants were canceled. In a recent court filing, an attorney for the Energy Department admitted — in remarkably plain English — that the cancellations were driven solely by partisan politics:
“With one exception, the 284 terminated grants had a recipient location and/or at least one place of performance in a state that awarded its electoral votes to Kamala Harris in the 2024 election and has two Democratic-caucusing Senators (‘Blue State’ grants),” the filing stated, contradicting previous public statements by officials.
We all suspected this was the case, but it’s nice for the administration to put it in writing. It should make the lawsuits go worse for them.
The country, thanks entirely to Republicans, has been on this “make disaster aid a political football” trajectory for years. Chris Christie’s presidential campaign in 2016 was fatally sunk partly because he had not only accepted disaster aid from the Obama administration after Superstorm Sandy, but he had even hugged the Kenyan usurper out of gratitude. In public! Where people could see it!
But Trump has taken it to a whole new level, starting with the grief he put California through when it needed help after massive wildfires early in his second term.
All of this makes us wonder whether, if we lived in one of those snow-bombed states, we would have bothered writing the IRS a big check in April. Why bother paying federal taxes if the government is going to take them and then tell you to fuck off when you have an emergency? The four states that saw their aid requests rejected haven’t been colonies for 250 years, but that is exactly what Trump is turning them into.
[POLITICO / The Atlantic]
FEMA also turned down our request for aid because we’re only emotional disasters. So please donate to help keep Wonkette going.
Kinda figure he’s also stealing the money.
OT:
Today my father would have been 88.
:)
Happy birthday, Dad.