Trump Responds to Tragedy With Cruelty

On Friday afternoon, as several counties across California were being incinerated by late-season wildfires, President Donald Trump signed a declaration providing federal money for the emergency response. But the president clearly wasn’t happy about it. About 10 hours later, he made a threat: If California goes up in flames like this again, he might just let it burn.

There is no reason for these massive, deadly and costly forest fires in California except that forest management is so poor. Billions of dollars are given each year, with so many lives lost, all because of gross mismanagement of the forests. Remedy now, or no more Fed payments!

At the very moment Trump sent his Saturday morning tweet, the Camp Fire in Butte County was actively burning homes to the ground, and the 27,000 residents of Paradise, California were only beginning to take stock of their massive losses. Mere hours beforehand, thousands were fleeing the city in panic, many abandoning their cars and running through the woods to escape the rapidly-encroaching heat and suffocating smoke. Several people died. By Monday, the Camp Fire had become the deadliest and most destructive wildfire in state history.

“Oh my God.. embers are going in the car... I can’t hardly breathe...” Coming up on @NBCNightlyNews, video of one family’s terrifying escape from Paradise, California as flames close in. #CampFire #ButteCounty pic.twitter.com/YrIz6ptJ3F

A few hundred miles south, the rapidly spreading Woolsey Fire and the nearby Hill Fire had just started picking up speed. When Trump sent his tweet, at least 75,000 homes in Ventura and Los Angeles counties were under evacuation order. By Monday, that number had ballooned to 200,000. With only 20 percent of the fire contained, nearly 400 structures had been destroyed.

Was just sent this video from the Seminole Springs mobile home park in Malibu. Most got out with “just the shirt on their backs.” Now they’ve lost count after seeing more than 100 structures destroyed by the #WoolseyFire. 📷: Eric Videgain pic.twitter.com/HH2lOefzkh

The death toll from the fires is still on the rise. So far, two have been found dead in the path of the Hill Fire, according to the Associated Press. And as of Monday, the Camp Fire had killed at least 29 people—though more than 200 remain unaccounted for. By the time the flames die down, thousands of people will have lost family and friends. A similar number will have lost their homes, and potentially everything they own.

That Trump would threaten California in the midst of this tragedy is, on its own, an act of cruelty. But his tweet was also plain wrong. He complained that the “costly” blazes wouldn’t have happened were it not for “gross mismanagement of the forests.” But there’s no dense forest surrounding the cities hit hardest by the fires. “The area that’s burned is not particularly foresty; it’s brush,” said Sharon McNary, a reporter for Southern California Public Radio. “It’s classic brush fire territory.” The Pasadena Firefighters Association also corrected the president:

Mr. President, with all due respect, you are wrong. The fires in So. Cal are urban interface fires and have NOTHING to do with forest management. Come to SoCal and learn the facts & help the victims. Scott Austin, Pres IAFF 809. @IAFFNewsDesk https://t.co/d3jY0SeosF

It’s true that forest management is a problem in California. The state’s forests have more than 100 million dead trees, providing more fuel for wildfires. But that’s as much the federal government’s fault as it is California’s. The U.S. Forest Service is supposed to help clear the trees, but historically has had to spend most of its budget on fighting fires. Trump has signed legislation to give the Forest Service an additional $2 billion to manage forests, but that doesn’t go into effect until 2020.

Regardless, poor forest management isn’t to blame for the severity of these particular fires. That honor goes to the weather. “Forest management has nothing to do with mountain winds coming down the passes at 70 miles per hour, or humidity levels in one hour dropping Thursday from 35 percent down into single digits, dryer than most deserts,” CNN meteorologist Tom Sater explained on Sunday. And weather like this is already becoming more likely in California due to climate change.

There’s also the problem of rapid urban sprawl within the Wildland-Urban Interface, where forests and other undeveloped lands meet areas inhabited by humans. There are approximately 45 million homes in these interfaces across the country, and the Forest Service expects that number will rise another 40 percent by 2030. “If there is a vulnerability here, it’s the people who live in this area who built in the Wildland-Urban Interface and not the forest management itself,” McNary said.

Saturday wasn’t the first time Trump has offered a false explanation for a devastating wildfire. This past summer, he tweeted that firefighters in California didn’t have access to enough water to fight wildfires, a claim that stupefied firefighters. It also wasn’t the first time that Trump has attacked Americans amid tragedy: Just weeks after Hurricane Maria hit Puerto Rico, in a series of tweets, he called the island’s electrical grid and infrastructure a “disaster” and said that the government “cannot keep FEMA, the Military & the First Responders, who have been amazing (under the most difficult circumstances) in P.R. forever!”

But Trump’s tweet on Saturday was a new low—simultaneously ignorant and inhumane. Since then, he has seesawed between words of concern and complaint. A tweet on Saturday evening, in which he finally expressed sadness for the wildfire victims, suggested that he had come to regret his misinformed, and obviously partisan, attack on Californian authorities.

More than 4,000 are fighting the Camp and Woolsey Fires in California that have burned over 170,000 acres. Our hearts are with those fighting the fires, the 52,000 who have evacuated, and the families of the 11 who have died. The destruction is catastrophic. God Bless them all.

Or perhaps not. By Sunday morning, he was back to business as usual.

With proper Forest Management, we can stop the devastation constantly going on in California. Get Smart!

And on Monday—perhaps due to a growing backlash from firefighters, a blue-collar constituency he claims to represent—Trump finally thanked them for their heroism.

The California Fire Fighters, FEMA and First Responders are amazing and very brave. Thank you and God Bless you all!

It’s only a matter of time before he complains about forest management again.

With Democrats in control of the House, they are now faced with the question of how best to use their legislative authority. Nancy Pelosi has already drafted a lengthy list of goals: lowering prescription drug prices, investing in infrastructure, restoring background checks for gun buyers, protecting Dreamers with legal residency status, among others. President Trump has signaled at least some interest in cooperating on a few of these, telling Fox and Friends in October that he shared many areas of “commonality” with Democrats. Trump has always had a putative willingness to break from GOP orthodoxy. Perhaps, with a divided Congress, his ideology-free approach to policy could combine with Democratic fears of being tagged as “obstructionist,” and grease the wheels for compromise.

Chasing quick policy victories may be tempting. But compromise measures that can pass the House, gain Republican support in the Senate, and be signed into law by Trump are unlikely—to put it mildly—to be particularly progressive. And handing the president public-relations victories that he can campaign on—He finally pivoted to infrastructure! He lowered prescription drug prices!—might undermine future Democratic presidential hopefuls seeking to run on those issues in 2020.

Beyond tactical advantage, there is a more important reason to spurn a short-term agenda: Any legislation passed in 2019 is not really about policy, but an opening salvo in the larger battle of political ideas and values the country will face in the coming years. Democrats should see this next Congress as a first phase of what could be a thoroughly transformative era of American politics.

There will be many Democrats taken with the desire to return to “normal” in politics. What could be more normal and forward-looking than solid policy victories forged out of common ground with the president? Yet these are not normal days. The United States is in a moment of dramatic ideological flux. The rise of white nationalism as a political force—and Trump’s election enabling its full absorption into the modern GOP—have opened a moral rift in the nation’s politics. This division cannot be wiped away by a return to policy-making norms. Congressional Democrats should forget about just doing something, and pursue a legislative agenda that offers a clear moral vision—even if they don’t pass a thing in 2019 or 2020.

Despite their success in November, the left must remember that political transformations don’t just happen. Previous periods of change emerged after painstaking, decades-long work of building grassroots movements and advancing bold, compelling ideas. That the center of gravity has shifted in mainstream party politics is often only apparent after the fact.

Consider the First Gilded Age of the late nineteenth century, when the country faced a surprisingly similar confluence of problems: widening financial inequality, rampant corruption and concentrated corporate power, and a judiciary hostile to reform. It was at this low societal ebb that the organized labor, consumer rights, and antitrust movements, among others, came into being. Coinciding with these national trends were experiments in democratic reform at the state and local level—autonomous policy-making power for cities, the rise of ballot referendums—as well as early efforts at regulating monopolies, railroads, and establishing consumer protections. Many of these policies were pioneered by state legislatures, and then attempted—with varying degrees of failure and success—in Congress during the Progressive Era. Together, they acted as a sort of social “proof of concept” for what more robust economic regulation, labor rights, and consumer protections might look like. They paved the way for the more radical and transformational public policies implemented in the New Deal a decade or two later by understanding how important it was to set standards rather than merely win.

Another lesson this Congress might take from history would be the importance of changing party structures from the inside. The labor movement achieved some of its most important political victories in the midcentury only after it gained a foothold within the Democratic Party. Similarly, it was the alliance with the GOP that helped make the NRA the potent political force it is today. In the 1930s and 1940s, the Congress of Industrial Organizations, a multiracial labor union founded in 1935, occupied the left flank of the New Deal coalition, where it pressured FDR to resist compromise with congressional conservatives. The CIO also shifted the balance of power at the state level: As Northern politicians increasingly sought African American votes, the CIO was able to convince state parties to add civil rights planks to their platforms decades before 1964, when the Civil Rights Act was finally enacted. And in this, the CIO’s influence extended far beyond a single election or legislative session.

The experience of labor and civil rights in the midcentury is instructive today. Those movements pushed for legislative policy, but their biggest long-term impact came once they had driven a new generation of legislators into office, who gradually shifted the party’s baseline platform. Over time, it became more centrally associated first with labor, and then with civil rights. Today’s liberals should follow this model. If they want to change the country, they should focus on changing the Democratic Party, rather than passing bills that are only going to die in the Senate or get booted off Trump’s desk in the Oval Office.

So what does that mean for 2018? As Ayanna Pressley, the congresswoman-elect from Massachusetts’s 7th District, put it so succinctly on the campaign trail earlier this year, “Change can’t wait.” But the Democrats in Congress have to be disciplined. They should focus on advancing bills built around big-picture, long-term policy solutions rather than incremental compromises. House Democrats such as John Sarbanes of Maryland have called for a sweeping reform agenda that includes renewed defenses for voting rights, a reordered public financing system, and major changes to lobbying and corruption laws. It is true that such bills are unlikely to overcome Republican opposition in the Senate. And some moderate Democrats may not be convinced either; Representative Cheri Bustos warned a few weeks ago that reforms should be “doable,” focused on winning “folks in the middle.” But advancing ambitious proposals in a moment when real legislative change is unlikely is not actually impractical.

Despite centrist unease with “identity politics,” the reality is that the Democrats’ long-term electoral coalition rests on young, multiracial constituencies, people whose politics are committed to directly addressing issues of inequality and racial justice. Recent public opinion research focusing on “missing voters”—who turned out for Obama but stayed home in 2016—suggests that they are further to the left than traditional “swing” voters on major issues like health care and regulation. Big ideas will appeal to them more than some uninspired compromise that only Donald Trump could love.

That might start with an economic plan focused on public goods, like Medicare for all, free college, universal access to broadband. Democrats should think of ways to protect workers in an era of precarious employment and unrivaled corporate power. Propose improvements to infrastructure and draft regulations to create more affordable housing. Draft a new Civil Rights Act that focuses on modern areas of concern with public accommodations, environmental justice, and the desegregation of cities and schools. And enfranchise citizens—by restoring voting rights for former felons, as Florida did, and by passing redistricting reform, independence for Puerto Rico, and statehood for the District of Columbia. These are wildly varied plans, ambitious and aspirational, and it’s unlikely any of them will be signed into law, but it doesn’t matter: They could shift the values within the party, and serve as trial runs for broader change in 2020 and beyond.

If Democrats are smart, congresswomen like New York’s Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Michigan’s Rashida Tlaib, and Minnesota’s Ilhan Omar will represent the future of party leadership. Democrats have traditionally relied on norms of seniority to decide leadership positions, and all indications are that Nancy Pelosi will return as speaker. But Democrats would do better to elevate someone new who can mobilize young communities of color and argue for political ideals free of the baggage of previous decades of political conflict.

None of these tactics could rightly be called a legislative agenda. But perhaps they add up to something more fundamental: a far-reaching strategy for social change. Democrats are today engaged in a struggle over ideas, and not just with the GOP and Donald Trump, but with themselves. To make a better party, and a better country, one that makes the setbacks and suffering of the past two years worthwhile, Democrats may have to lose some fights in this next Congress. Lose now, lose the right way, and the future could be theirs.

If Sean Casten had talked about climate change once during his campaign, that would have been more than most Democrats running for Congress. But Casten didn’t talk about climate change just once, or even merely ten or twenty times, as he sought to flip Illinois 6th Congressional District from red to blue. He made it the center of his entire campaign.

“After years fighting climate change as an entrepreneur, I’m now determined to fight it as the next member of Congress,” reads Casten’s Twitter bio, updated to reflect his victory on Tuesday. A scientist, environmental writer, and the founder of a successful renewable energy business, Casten talked repeatedly about global warming on the campaign trail and regularly called out his opponent—six-term incumbent Republican Representative Peter Roskam—for being weak on the subject.

Casten’s focus on climate was mostly overlooked in the widespread coverage of his five-point upset of Roskam, who once referred to climate change as “junk science.” But it’s an important factor, considering the Democratic Party’s prevailing logic on the subject. Knowing that global warming can be a polarizing issue, most Democrats running in red or purple districts this year strategically avoided talking about it. They feared, according to The New York Times, that “highlighting climate change risks handing conservative voters a motivating issue to turn out against them.”

So why didn’t Casten heed that logic in Illinois’ 6th, given that it’s been in Republican hands for more than 40 years?

“I’ve never run for any office before,” Casten told me in a Friday phone interview. “But what I have done is spent the last 20 years doing something about climate change. So I wasn’t going to suddenly turn into a different beast on the day I ran for office.” He said he didn’t receive any warnings from Democratic Party officials about his campaign platform. “I think its a misconception that the party controls messaging,” he said.

Casten’s professional background likely helped his case for voters, as he’s proven that reducing greenhouse gas emissions can be economically profitable. The business he founded in 2007, Recycled Energy Development LLC, focuses on improving the efficiency of energy production. “I’ve found that, if I tried to convince people to address climate change for purely environment reasons, that was hard,” he said. “But running on climate change as an economic opportunity is a fantastic can-opener.”

The district’s unique voter makeup also likely contributed to his success. As ThinkProgress noted in an August profile, Illinois’ 6th “covers an area that includes people who work for two different national laboratories, Fermilab and Argonne National Lab.” “It’s a very highly-educated, scientifically minded set of voters,” Casten told ThinkProgress. “They are people who value facts, and are generally pretty centrist—bipartisan—in their world view.”

There was another reason to believe Casten’s message might resonate with voters: Hillary Clinton won the district in 2016. Even so, it was an undoubtedly risky strategy in trying to flip a seat held by Republicans for nearly half a century. Could it be that Democrats’ prevailing logic on global warming—that talking about it is political suicide—is wrong?

Casten isn’t sure, but he hopes so. “The idea of the businesses I’ve ran was that the scale of climate change was too big for one company to solve—but if we made money, maybe other people would follow,” he said. “So if that translates to politics, and the run-out of a six-term climate denier makes Democrats want to run on that in 2020, that’d be pretty awesome.”

And even if polling doesn’t suggest that it’s a winning message, that shouldn’t discourage Democrats from talking boldly about solving climate change, Casten argued. It’s the government’s duty to solve societal problems, even ones that much of the citizenry denies or ignores—perhaps especially those ones. “This isn’t a question of polling well, it’s a question of how do you change public opinion,” Casten said. “That’s what leadership is—not to follow public opinion, but to shape it.”

For over a year, Amazon dangled the prize of a second headquarters, or HQ2, in front of cities across the country, and then watched as they duked it out. The result was a sort of hypercapitalist Hunger Games, in which cities and states debased themselves in the hopes of reaping tens of thousands of jobs and several billion dollars in investment. The biggest bidders promised billions in tax breaks and subsidies, while smaller municipalities resorted to more creative measures: The mayor of Stonecrest, Georgia, offered to build a town named Amazon and to anoint CEO Jeff Bezos, the richest man alive, as its king.

That competition apparently ended last week, when it was reported that Amazon had chosen the Solomon option: not one, but two additional headquarters. One would be located in the Virginia suburbs of Washington, D.C., the other in Queens, New York. It was an anticlimactic end, given the expectations. But if indeed Amazon has decided to split HQ2 among two of America’s most profitable cities, the tech behemoth may exacerbate several societal problems—including one it claims to want to solve.

The HQ2 selection process was always a racket. Often referred to as a “sweepstakes,” it was designed for only one winner: Amazon. The company not only garnered free, widespread publicity, but also drove up its asking price, as some competitors raised their bids by billions. It’s possible that the plan all along was not to open a second headquarters, but to open two, smaller satellites. What’s unlikely, however, is that the deals being offered to Amazon will change significantly, even though the company is effectively halving their investment.

Amazon has already faced backlash for its handling of HQ2. The $1 trillion company is hardly in need of public handouts, and yet it has benefited greatly from taxpayer dollars in recent years. It may have sensed there would be further backlash over its decision, which would explain why the news broke on the eve of the midterm elections, effectively burying it. Unlike other localities, which made their offers public, not much is known about the bids from New York City and Virginia. But the public scrutiny of HQ2 will only intensify as the details—and the social consequences of HQ2—become clear.

The D.C. suburbs were always seen as a favorite, given that Bezos owns The Washington Post and that Amazon’s lobbying spending has increased dramatically in recent years. He also appears to enjoy spending time there. New York, where Bezos worked as a hedge fund manager before moving west, has been Silicon Valley’s closest tech rival for some time. But there were also strong reasons not to choose either New York or D.C., since neither is desperate for economic investment or high-skilled jobs. In fact, Amazon’s presence may be a net negative for both places.

Washington, D.C, and New York, already have tight housing markets, and will be further squeezed by an influx of highly paid, younger workers. Both cities also have decaying public transportation networks that are struggling to meet demand. HQ2 will only aggravate those problems. “The 7 train is overloaded today, and we can’t sell Long Island City as being transportation rich,” Councilman Jimmy Van Bramer told The New York Times, referring to the Queens neighborhood where half of HQ2 would be located. “The people who work at Amazon are going to be competing for space on that train.”

HQ2 would present problems wherever it opened, but there was a stronger case for Amazon to choose somewhere less prosperous. “The economic impact of locating a new corporate campus with 20,000 highly paid jobs would be radically different in a city like Detroit, Cleveland, or Indianapolis for the simple reason that these cities have a lot of slack in their housing markets,” Vox’s Matt Yglesias wrote last week. Even with tax breaks, HQ2 would act as an economic stimulus for a struggling region.

Activists in New York and D.C. have been mobilizing against Amazon for quite some time. A year ago, a number of New York City community groups wrote to Mayor Bill de Blasio to protest potential tax breaks:

You should focus on pushing Amazon to be a better corporate citizen and improving how it treats communities and workers. You should also ensure that this multibillion-dollar company, [which] already has a significant presence in New York, does not receive financial incentives simply for doing business here. New York communities are facing massive cuts to public goods and services, and working families are trying to make ends meet.

In Washington, long seen as a frontrunner, the opposition is much more organized. “If D.C. does get chosen, we have some real issues with how Amazon does business, in terms of fair labor, equitable hiring, and equitable practices for people of color and women in particular,” the Fair Budget Coalition’s Stephanie Sneed told me back in April. Although HQ2 would be in neighboring Northern Virginia, it would have a significant impact on D.C.

Amazon has been batting away bad publicity (often for its labor conditions) and government scrutiny (often on antitrust grounds) for a while now—most recently in September, when Senator Bernie Sanders unveiled the Stop BEZOS Act. While the bill itself, designed to punish large employers whose workers received public assistance, was shoddy and misguided, its true purpose was to punish Amazon by making it the face of corporations that underpaid and mistreated its workers. In October, Amazon announced that it would raise its minimum wage to $15 and begin lobbying the federal government to raise the national minimum wage.

By moving to New York and Northern Virginia, Amazon may further tighten housing markets, contributing to greater homelessness, and put more stress on failing public transportation. Seattle, where Amazon is based, has seen housing prices and homelessness skyrocket in recent years—problems the company certainly didn’t cause, but which it’s certainly making worse. The crisis prompted Seattle’s city council to pass a tax on large employers, like Amazon, to help pay for affordable housing; the company responded by threatening to stop construction in the city. “We remain very apprehensive about the future created by the council’s hostile approach and rhetoric toward larger businesses, which forces us to question our growth here,” Amazon vice president Drew Herdener said at the time. Ultimately, pressure from Amazon killed the tax, although Bezos announced that he would be contributing $2 billion toward combating homelessness and early education in September.

Many in New York are looking at Seattle as an example of what Amazon will do to an already stretched market. “Growth challenges are already familiar ones in New York City and metropolitan Washington, D.C., where once-affordable neighborhoods have morphed into upmarket enclaves, and aging and overloaded transit systems create daily headaches for their millions of riders,” Margaret O’Mara, a historian at the University of Washington, wrote last week in The New York Times. “Just as in San Francisco and Seattle, HQ2’s arrival could make them far worse.”

Amazon likely chose Washington and New York for obvious reasons, making the pageantry surrounding the yearlong search for an HQ2 site all the more absurd. These are attractive places to work, and, as national hubs of politics and media respectively, they influence the national discussion. But they’re also among just a handful of major cities that could meet Amazon’s needs, in terms of infrastructure and talent. That was always true, and the company cleverly exploited it, using cities that never stood a chance to extract concessions from the few that did.

“Of the many places that offered themselves on a platter, only a dozen or so truly made sense for Amazon to consider,” Annie Lowrey wrote last week in The Atlantic. “The rest would have needed far more development for the company to justify heading there—development that would excite existing businesses, would-be entrepreneurs, and companies quietly looking for a new corporate site.” This regional economic inequality is unsustainable for the country at large, and yet Amazon’s decision suggests that it will only worsen in the years to come.

There was hope among many HQ2 bidders that Amazon would be the cure to decades of problems. But it’s clear now that the company never intended to save a struggling American city, transforming its economy, infrastructure, and perhaps even schools; it only ever made sense, in purely capitalist terms, to choose a city that already was flourishing. The dozens of desperate bidders, from Detroit to Stonecrest, were nothing but pawns in a rigged, zero-sum game they’ve been losing for decades.