On June 20, the Trump administration released a report some officials hoped would never see the light of day. The draft study from the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry found that contaminated water across the country, especially on and near military bases, was far more toxic than the government realized. That meant potentially millions of Americans had been drinking water with unsafe levels of perfluoroalkyls, or PFAS, which can cause cancer and liver disease, disrupt hormone levels, and complicate pregnancies. Potentially millions drink that water today.
The government’s dire findings explained why political aides to Scott Pruitt, at the time the head of the Environmental Protection Agency, had suppressed the report for months, fearing what one called a “public relations nightmare.” But nearly one month after the study’s release, alleged victims of PFAS contamination don’t think that nightmare has come true—at least not in the way they’d hoped.
“The country’s oblivious,” said Peggy Price, a former U.S. Marine sergeant who testified at a congressional forum on pollution issues last week. “They’re all distracted by Trump.” Price, who was stationed at Camp Lejeune in Jacksonville, North Carolina, in the 1980s, was exposed to “contaminated drinking water at levels as high as 3,400 times above maximum contaminant levels,” the American Conservative reported last year. One of those contaminants was PFAS, a class of chemicals used in everything from non-stick pans to firefighting foams.
Because those foams are routinely used in military training exercises, 126 military facilities across the U.S. have nearby water supplies containing levels of PFAS above the EPA’s standard of 70 parts per trillion. The ATSDR concluded, however, that the EPA’s standard is woefully inadequate to protect from harmful impacts. A safe limit would be closer to seven parts per trillion.
Price believes her exposure to PFAS caused her brain tumor, her skin cancer, her breast cancer as well as the serious medical problems that affect all four of her children. “I’d trade a public relations nightmare for the nightmare I’ve lived through any day of the week,” she told me.
Though she hasn’t witnessed the public outcry she’d hoped to see in the wake of the ATSDR’s report, Price is still working to convince Congress and the EPA to take serious action on PFAS contamination. “Nothing’s going to change for me, but it might change for other people,” she said. “I know that the contaminants are still out there, and these young families—I know the hell they’re going to go through.”
On Tuesday, two members of Congress—a Democrat and a Republican—took a small step toward answering Price’s call.
Military facilities aren’t the only communities with PFAS in their water. Approximately a third of households in Marana, Arizona, have tap water tainted with the pollutants. Dozens of residents of Newburgh, New York, are suing the town after PFAS allegedly leaked from a nearby military facility into their water supply. The chemical compounds are also “contaminating water supplies and the environment across both peninsulas of Michigan,” MLive.com recently reported, deeming PFAS “Michigan’s next water crisis.”
“We’re talking about a national, widespread contamination problem.”
But the problem could be more far-reaching, because many cities aren’t testing their water systems for PFAS levels below the EPA’s current standard, according to environmental defense attorney Robert Bilott. When they do, he said, they’re often surprised at what they find. “Every day, a new community somewhere in the country is learning that [PFAS] is in their drinking water and may have been in there for quite some time,” Bilott said. “We’re talking about a national, widespread contamination problem.”
Bilott was one of the first people to raise hell about PFAS in 2001, when he filed a class action lawsuit against DuPont, the chemical giant, over health impacts stemming from perfluorooctanoic acid, or PFOA. (PFOA, a PFAS chemical, is used to make Teflon.) That same year, Bilott sent a lengthy letter to the EPA, warning that PFOA may pose “an imminent and substantial threat to health or the environment.”
Seventeen years later, Bilott said he’s stunned the EPA hasn’t strengthened its standards for PFAS in drinking water. After all, the ATSDR report was not the first scientific study to assert that PFAS was more dangerous than previously believed. “Even though we’ve got some of the most comprehensive human health data in existence, at least on PFOA, we still don’t have federal, enforceable standards for this in drinking water,” he said, extending his criticism to the Obama administration. “We’ve trying for years to encourage EPA to lower the guidelines and set enforceable standards. That simply didn’t happen during the prior eight years either.”
But the ATSDR report has renewed some bipartisan pressure on the EPA. On Tuesday afternoon, Democratic Congressman Dan Kildee and Republican Congressman Fred Upton, both of Michigan, sent a letter to the EPA’s new acting administrator, Andrew Wheeler, urging him “to review the final toxicological profile and, as appropriate, act immediately to adjust the health advisory levels for [PFAS].” In a phone interview, Kildee said the letter was directly inspired by the ATSDR report. “As soon as we saw the study and realized that it didn’t appear the EPA intended to do much about it, we felt like we had to act,” he said.
But Kildee said the report should have more impact than previous studies because of where it came from: within an administration that has been hostile toward scientific evidence. “It’s really important that this PFAS study was released, because it was conducted by an agency that ought to have legitimacy with the EPA,” he said. “This is not a study the federal government can dismiss because it did it itself.”
The EPA insists it’s taking action. “Addressing [PFAS] is one of EPA’s top priorities and the agency is committed to continuing to participate in and contribute to a coordinated approach across the federal government,” Peter Grevatt, the director of EPA’s Office of Ground Water and Drinking Water, told me in an emailed statement. In May, Pruitt held a summit to discuss how best to regulate the chemical compounds. (Environmental advocates and alleged victims of PFAS pollution were not invited, however.) The agency also has held “community engagement events” to seek input from affected communities.
But Kildee fears the EPA will continue to stall unless the public starts demanding aggressive action on PFAS contamination. He speaks from experience. Not only does he represent Michigan’s first known PFAS contamination site in the city of Oscoda, he represents the lead-poisoned city of Flint. “Having gone through what I’ve gone through in Flint, and now experiencing it in a different way with Oscoda, we have to force the issue,” he said. “We are have two choices: Deal with it, or pretend it doesn’t exist. I fear the impulse of the EPA so far has been to pretend it doesn’t exist.”
Price fears that impulse, too. But when she left her congressional forum on PFAS last week, she saw a glimmer of hope. “I left Camp Lejeune in September of ’84, and this is the first time that anyone has cared, or wanted to listen to this story,” she said. “And that meant a lot.”
President Donald Trump’s seven-day swing through Europe last week, which concluded on Monday with his meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin, was clarifying. But not in the way many critics think.
While Trump’s latest trip abroad provided some important insights into his worldview and ideology, which has long stumped observers, for many it simply confirmed once and for all that he is Putin’s puppet. Charles Blow, the New York Times columnist, wrote that “Trump is a traitor and may well be treasonous,” a sentiment that other Trump critics appeared to share. “Dear Allies - Call on Trump to resign,” MSNBC contributor Scott Dworkin tweeted. “The world can’t afford to have Putin’s puppet acting as if he’s president.” Even Hillary Clinton chimed in: “Question for President Trump as he meets Putin: Do you know which team you play for?”
These and other critics couldn’t think of any other explanation for Trump’s behavior over the past week. (Last week, in a New York magazine cover story, Jonathan Chait floated a theory that Trump has been a Russian asset since 1987.) But there’s a more plausible explanation. Trump sees himself in—and aspires to be—the Russian president, not just as a nationalistic authoritarian but a distinguished culture warrior.
To be fair to the critics above, Trump’s behavior was indeed troubling. During the NATO summit, Trump insulted and alienated leaders of the United States’ closest allies, and it became clear early on that he had no intention of toning down his rhetoric. After declaring that Germany was “captive to Russia,” blasting other members as “delinquent,” and threatening to “go it alone” if other countries didn’t raise their spending, the president held a bizarre press conference on Thursday to declare the summit a success and once again refer to himself as a “stable genius.” The NATO summit was a success in at least one sense: As Alex Ward put it in Vox, the big winner of the summit was Vladimir Putin, who “wants to divide NATO.”
Halfway through the president’s eurotrip, the Justice Department announced the indictment of 12 Russian nationals for hacking emails associated with the Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee (DNC), which all but confirmed the Kremlin’s interference in the 2016 election. This indictment made the president’s meeting with Putin all the more controversial, and on Sunday, Trump attracted even more controversy when he said that the “European Union is a foe” to America.
The week concluded with the long-anticipated meeting between Trump and Putin and, in stark contrast to the U.S. president’s behavior earlier in his trip, he was positively chummy with Mr. Putin, who predictably denied interfering in the 2016 election. During their press conference after the meeting, Trump effectively sided with the Russian president against his own justice department, prompting widespread condemnation. Trump’s news conference “was nothing short of treasonous,” tweeted former CIA Director John Brennan, adding that Trump was “wholly in the pocket” of Putin.
This theory that Trump is in the pocket of Putin is still very much a conspiracy theory—just like the claim that the DNC and Clinton campaign emails were the result of an internal leak, not a Russian hack—and like most conspiracy theories it is probably false. The idea that Trump is somehow a traitor who worked for Putin is obviously appealing to those who see Trump and Putin as a dual threat to democracy, and the fact that the Russian government interfered in the 2016 election to help Trump—which the Trump campaign welcomed—makes it all the more believable.
But even after Trump’s scandalous week in Europe, there is still a better explanation for his apparent hostility towards Europe and affection for Putin: Trump and Putin have similar worldviews and political temperaments, and thus see eye to eye on many things. Both are political reactionaries and ultra-nationalists and, though Putin is far more authoritarian, Trump has made it clear that he would rather be a dictator than the leader of a democracy with constitutional restraints on his authority. The American president has a long history of praising authoritarian leaders like Putin and President Xi Jinping of China while disparaging democratically elected leaders as “weak,” so it is not surprising that he would admire the Russian president.
During his visit to Britain, Trump provided further insight into his worldview when he went on an extended rant about immigration, suggesting that in Europe it was “changing the culture,” and that European leaders “better watch themselves”—in other words, implying that non-Europeans cannot continue so-called “Western civilization.” Putin has made similar claims about Russian culture and civilization, and has been driven by a desire to restore Russia to its past glory, viewing the collapse of the Soviet Union as a “catastrophe” not because he believes in communism (far from it), but because he believes in Russia’s destiny to lead “Eurasia.” As Steven Lee Myers observes in his biography, The New Tsar, Putin does not lament the demise of the Soviet system “but the demise of the historical Russian idea,” emanating from the Slavophile tradition.
During a speech at the Valdai summit in 2013, Putin put forward a reactionary critique of the West similar to the one offered last week by Trump, albeit much more articulate: “We can see how many of the Euro-Atlantic countries are actually rejecting their roots, including the Christian values that constitute the basis of Western civilization. They are denying moral principles and all traditional identities: national, cultural, religious and even sexual. They are implementing policies that equate large families with same-sex partnerships, belief in God with the belief in Satan.”
This critique is informed by Putin’s nationalism and anti-liberalism, qualities that Trump shares. Trump does not view the European Union as a foe because he is anti-Europe per se, but because his nationalist worldview conflicts with the international liberal order, which the EU epitomizes. Like right-wing European populists, he is a Eurosceptic who is driven by nativism and a hostility towards “globalism.” For Trump and European reactionaries, globalism represents a threat to traditional values and “Western civilization,” and like Putin, Trump’s reactionary social views shape his view of Europe.
Trump and Putin, then, are friendly because they are allies against liberalism and “globalism.” No doubt Putin is far more politically astute than Trump, and he recognizes that his country will benefit much more from the collapse of the international order than Trump’s country, which helped establish it. But this hardly means Trump is his “puppet.” Peddling such conspiracy theories, or accusing the president of the United States of treason without solid proof, only contributes to the deterioration of democratic norms. The rise of right-wing nationalism around the world demands a serious critique, not a revival of Cold War paranoia.
At times, it looked like Russian President Vladimir Putin could hardly contain his excitement.
With the flash of a smile or a curt laugh, Putin broke character as his counterpart, U.S. President Donald J. Trump, showered him with compliments at a press conference following their first-ever summit meeting in Helsinki on July 16. On top of that, Trump unloaded on the FBI, the U.S. intelligence community, and Hillary Clinton.
It was an exercise in contrasts. And for the U.S. media and policy establishment, it was all too much. Anger, denouncements, and accusations of high treason characterized the wide-reaching response on the American side. Ask anyone on the Russian side, and the summit was a major success—Putin was finally embraced as an equal partner by a U.S. president.
Asked by reporters how the summit went, Putin’s foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, beamed that it was “better than super.”
But, in taking a step back, it is clear that little of consequence or permanence took place at the summit. Despite dire predictions in some quarters of Washington, Trump gave away nothing: There has been, at least publicly, no change in U.S. policy on Russia’s annexation of Crimea from Ukraine, no promises made regarding sanctions, and NATO is still a thing.
“The short-term gain is a symbolic one,” says Alexander Gabuev, a foreign policy analyst at the Moscow branch of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. “Putin appeared to be disciplined, he looked presidential and was seen alongside the U.S. president as an equal and looked much more statesmanlike.”
The only substance of the summit seem to have been verbal commitments to restoring dialogue between the two nuclear superpowers—quite possibly a good thing, especially given that both states are sleepwalking into a newer, scarier nuclear arms race with increasingly creative and high-tech means of wiping out the entirety of both populations.
So, what, then, did the Russians see? Discord between a sitting U.S. president and the so-called policy establishment. A potential wedge. An opportunity. In many ways, the Russian reaction to the summit resembled the exuberant—and, for the record, premature—celebrations seen in Moscow immediately following Trump’s unexpected 2016 victory over Clinton.
“The Helsinki summit was worth it if only to enjoy the reaction of Western politicians, experts and media personalities,” wrote columnist Ivan Danilov in RIA Novosti, one of the main Russian state news agencies. “Judging by the panic and hatred, [Putin] achieved a great success… [he] literally blew up the American information space.”
Commentators like Danilov honed in on a specific facet of Putin’s performance: calling out international boogieman George Soros for interfering in elections across the globe while linking Western financier and self-styled human rights activist Bill Browder to Clinton—a perfect storm of illiberal conspiracy thinking interpreted by some as a nod to Trump’s base.
“It shows Putin’s skill in judo.”Others noted the body language between the two presidents. Russians saw Putin nail his well-rehearsed calm and presidential manner, contrasted with Trump’s anxious and rambling delivery. Widely-read tabloid Komsomolskaya Pravda went so far as to feature a piece solely analyzing the leaders’ handshakes, and how Putin has improved his performance since last year’s G20 summit. “Trump usually presents his hand from below, hoping to mislead his opponent by signaling he is open to contact, only to pull his hand back to throw you off balance and cause confusion,” psychologist, Alexander Neveev, was quoted as saying in reference to a photo of Trump attempting this maneuver on Putin at the G20.
In a second photo, Trump can be seen offering Putin his hand on even ground, “without any tricks,” Neveev noted. “It shows Putin’s skill in judo, where almost every encounter with an opponent begins with an attempt to throw you off balance.” Putin, he added, had demonstrated that the American president cannot dominate his Russian counterpart.
These signals are of immense importance to Russians, at least in discussions about international politics. Putin’s domestic legitimacy is increasingly rooted in a sense that he has restored Russia as a great and respected international power. So long as he delivers perceived victories, even if those victories come in the form of righteous handshakes, he will be popular. In that sense, Trump’s obsequious performance on Monday may have as much of an effect on Russian domestic politics as on American domestic politics, adding to Putin’s authoritarian hand—already bolstered by Russia’s highly successful hosting of the World Cup—in dealing with his electorate.
Cooler heads in Russia, however, worry that Putin’s victory was too obvious, particularly as investigators in the US are busy indicting Russian military intelligence officers for interference in the 2016 election. Russians may relish Trump and Putin sticking it to the so-called U.S. establishment, but now they must fear that establishment’s wrath.
On November 09, 2016, Moscow celebrated Trump’s victory with champagne on the floor of the national legislature and election night parties.“The Russian president was obviously out-playing the American president,” commentator Mikhail Rostovsky wrote at the widely circulated tabloid Moskovsky Komsomolets, comparing the docile Trump in Helsinki to the “rude and boorish” showman who had insulted Angela Merkel, Theresa May, and Queen Elizabeth in short order the prior week. ”This filled my heart not only with pride, but anxiety. Out-playing Trump does not mean out-playing the American political class,” Rostovsky wrote, lamenting not only Trump’s timid behavior but Putin’s offensive thrust. “Putin didn’t seek to smooth out acute angles, he deliberately sharpened them.”
This fear of reaction from an alleged U.S. deep state is the principle reason a few commentators urge caution. After all, Russia’s optimism following Trump’s victory was quickly and systematically crushed in the weeks and months that lead to his inauguration, when sanctions failed to be lifted and the new president’s cabinet proved insufficiently pro-Kremlin. In effect, Russians took Trump’s anti-establishment rhetoric at face value and, perhaps, projected their own president’s outsized role in domestic affairs onto the American system and expected radical change in spite of traditional U.S. policy toward Russia. Many Russians, according to Gabuev, believe Trump “is rational and understands the importance of building a relationship with Russia. But he is opposed by the Russophobic establishment, including the mainstream media.” It is this experience that some analysts are keeping in mind as they look forward to what comes next in U.S.-Russia relations.
“There is a sense,” said Vladimir Frolov, an independent foreign policy analyst in Moscow, “that [Trump] again may have spoiled what looked like a modestly successful summit.” He pointed to last summer’s G20 meeting being immediately drowned out by the Russiagate scandal at home. “His dismal performance and the outrage in DC might prevent him from implementing what he may have agreed on with Putin.”
The biggest blowback may come from Putin’s most cunning tack: the proposal to give Special Counsel Robert Mueller access, via Russian law enforcement, to the 12 Russian military intelligence officers named in an indictment last week in exchange for Russian interrogation of financier and human rights campaigner Bill Browder.
“This only made things worse,” Frolov says. Putin’s overbearing performance, mixed with some of the hotter current trends in the so-called Russiagate investigation, could actually increase the risk that Trump would go along with tightening measures against Russia following Mueller’s indictments and the intelligence community’s repeated, firm assertions that Russia did indeed attempt to influence the 2016 election.
Russian celebration, therefore, of Putin’s performance in Helsinki seems split between outright jubilation, and those who worry the victory dance may be premature—too focused on short-term gains and Trump’s pro-Russian rhetoric. We’ve seen it all before. On November 09, 2016, Moscow celebrated Trump’s victory with champagne on the floor of the national legislature and election night parties. But when radical pro-Russia change failed to materialize, the lack of follow-through was blamed on the anti-Russian policy establishment in Washington—entrenching the notion that Russia was under assault from a committed U.S.-led international conspiracy against Putin and the people.
Once the euphoria of Putin’s optical triumph over Trump in Helsinki fades, and the reality of the situation again sinks in, it will be this American establishment that Russians blame. None of it will fall on Putin’s lap. However short lived, he brought them victory in Helsinki.
The Federal Emergency Management Agency was already supporting 692 federally declared disasters when hurricane season started last year. Then came the most destructive disaster season in U.S. history, causing $265 billion in damage and forcing more than a million Americans from their homes. FEMA was overwhelmed.
So the agency has a novel suggestion for Americans as the 2018 disaster season heats up: Don’t rely on us.
In a report last week evaluating its response to last year’s disaster, FEMA details “how ill-prepared the agency was to manage a crisis outside the continental United States, like the one in Puerto Rico,” The New York Times reported. “And it urges communities in harm’s way not to count so heavily on FEMA in a future crisis.”
“The work of emergency management does not belong just to FEMA,” the agency stated near the end of the report. “It is the responsibility of the whole community, federal, [state, local, tribal and territorial governments], private sector partners, and private citizens to build collective capacity and prepare for the disasters we will inevitably face.”
The sentiment echoes President Donald Trump’s own comments about Puerto Rico last year, following the devastation wrought by Hurricane Maria.
...Such poor leadership ability by the Mayor of San Juan, and others in Puerto Rico, who are not able to get their workers to help. They....
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) September 30, 2017...want everything to be done for them when it should be a community effort. 10,000 Federal workers now on Island doing a fantastic job.
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) September 30, 2017Still, it’s probably good advice, because thousands of people who depended on FEMA for help last year are still struggling. They include 83-year-old Rosalea Nall, who lived in a hotel for eight months after her Texas home was flooded during Hurricane Harvey. Last week, she had to move back into her gutted house after FEMA stopped providing housing vouchers for Harvey victims. They also include the more than 1,700 Puerto Rican refugees of Hurricane Maria, currently living in hotels on the mainland, whose housing assistance is set to expire on July 23 (and which would have expired on June 30, but for the grace of a federal judge). Meanwhile, approximately 1,000 people in Puerto Rico remain without electricity.
FEMA acknowledged many of its failures in last week’s report—notably that it emptied emergency supplies from a Puerto Rico warehouse just days before Maria hit. (The supplies were sent to the U.S. Virgin Islands, then reeling from Hurricane Irma.) As USA Today put it, the agency admitted its planning “was incomplete, did not adequately account for the possibility of multiple major disasters in a short amount of time, and underestimated the impact of ‘insufficiently maintained infrastructure’ in Puerto Rico.”
But FEMA also argued that an effective response was near-impossible given its resources. “FEMA entered the hurricane season with a [workforce] less than its target, resulting in staffing shortages across the incidents,” the report read. The agency has approximately 10,000 employees, but last year’s hurricanes and wildfires “collectively effected more than 47 million people—nearly 15 percent of the Nation’s population.”
Nearly 5 million households registered for FEMA assistance in 2017—more than the previous 10 years combined, and more than all who registered for assistance from hurricanes Katrina, Rita, Wilma, and Sandy combined. The wildfires in California were their own behemoth, requiring more federal response contracts than Hurricanes Harvey and Irma combined. FEMA’s response to Hurricane Maria was also “the longest sustained air mission of food and water delivery in FEMA history,” according to the report. Hurricane Irma was “one of the largest sheltering missions in U.S. history,” with 6.8 million people under evacuation order. Eighty percent of the households impacted by Hurricane Harvey did not have flood insurance, either, contributing to FEMA’s high costs.
FEMA thus was only able to pay for less than 10 percent of the destruction. Hurricanes Harvey, Irma, and Maria caused a combined $265 billion in damages, according to the report. Yet as of April 30, FEMA had only obligated $21.2 billion toward those damages.
The agency offered several recommendations for improving FEMA’s capability for this year’s disaster season, which is already underway. It suggested, for example, “enhancements to the planning process” when collaborating with state and local governments before disasters. FEMA essentially echoed the message from its planning report in February: “The most important lesson from the challenging disasters of 2017 is that success is best delivered through a system that is Federally supported, state managed, and locally executed.”
FEMA is certainly correct that disasters must be managed at all levels, but the most important lesson of the 2017 disaster season is that weather disasters are becoming more frequent and more damaging. The government’s failure to grapple with that reality contributed to FEMA’s poor response. For example, the 1988 Stafford Disaster Relief and Emergency Assistance Act—the law that gave FEMA its authority to coordinate disaster relief efforts—ensured that the agency could only re-build Puerto Rico’s weak electricity system after it was wiped out by Maria; it was not allowed to spend money on rebuilding a more resilient electricity system.
FEMA could have suggested a change in that law in its after-action report. And yet, just as the agency failed to mention climate change in its February report, it failed to do so in last week’s report. Extreme weather is getting more extreme, and until FEMA recognizes and acts on that reality, it will find itself overwhelmed indefinitely.
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