Juliette Kayyem is a former Assistant Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security in the Obama Administration. In that role she was responsible for “coordinated and consistent planning between the Department and all of its state, local, tribal, and territorial partners on issues as varied as immigration, intelligence sharing, military affairs, border security, and the response to operational events such as H1N1 influenza outbreak, the December 25th attempted terrorist attack, the Haiti earthquake, and the BP oil spill.” She is a professor at Harvard’s Kennedy School and a national security analyst for CNN.
What she has seen coming out of this White House over the last twelve hours has appalled her, as it has most decent Americans:
It is a difficult task to turn the memory of Hurricane Katrina into a quaint story of well-meaning government actors unable to save a city from destruction. President Donald Trump managed to do that on Saturday morning when he essentially blamed Puerto Rico and its mayor, in a series of tweets, for the devastation they are facing. From his own golf club, Trump attacked rather than reflected and helped.
Kayyem is not a pundit. She is reflexively sparing in offering criticism. She is familiar with the professionalism and dedication of those working the disaster in Puerto Rico, the inherent problems of distributing commodities on the island in its present crippled condition, and up to this point had given this Administration the benefit of the doubt:
In some ways, I had convinced myself that Trump was a bit player in this tragedy.
No longer. A good man who has empathy, or even knows how to pretend to have it, would not make the unfolding tragedy about himself. A confident President would not accuse Puerto Ricans of wanting "everything done for them." A self-reflective leader able to critically assess would question and push his team to send more resources and get the federal response moving. A strong Commander-in-Chief would know that his main duty is not to praise himself or lash back because of a bruised ego, but to use his global platform to provide two key needs: numbers (responders, commodities, ships, food, water, debris removal, etc) and hope.
That Trump lacks any real empathy or human compassion for anything beyond himself is hardly news to those of us who have previously made the acquaintance of sociopaths. It has been obvious from the moment he stepped away from the cameras and tabloids and presented his real self to the world. What appeared after the media’s airbrushing had faded was not some successful, charismatic and jovial businessman but a self so vacant and devoid of all common human impulses of decency, kindness, humor, or sympathy that it was very easy to foresee the way he would react to a human catastrophe similar to what we are witnessing right now. His campaign was built on hatred and resentment, but it was also built on an astonishing degree of belligerent self-assurance, knee-jerk defensiveness and lack of self-reflection that can only be described as pathological.
The impact of this type of callousness on the people suffering right now is incalculable. Kayyem points out that with his Tweets demeaning the Puerto Rican people for his own deficient response to their plight, and by politicizing the response of the Mayor of San Juan, Trump has, in effect, undercut the efforts of those tirelessly working on the ground to provide relief to those people:
While his tweets Saturday morning pretend to defend FEMA and the troops -- and White House Press Secretary Sarah Sanders would later clearly try to suggest that the critics of Trump were being misinformed about the President's support of the island -- they do the exact opposite. In the field, federal and local workers are toiling day in and day out to get the job done; there may be disagreements, but in every tragedy, those divisions fall away and everyone works together to harness their collective expertise, save lives and rebuild.
Trump just built a big wall between them. He is good at that, even in a tragedy. He has managed to divide rather than unite. By calling out the party affiliation of a mayor -- a Latina leader -- he has put politics right at the door of tragedy.
This is a level that George W. Bush never sank to even under the withering criticism for his response to Hurricane Katrina. It is the lowest, most depraved, indifferent response to a natural (or man-made) disaster by any President in our Nation’s history, and it will be the metric to which future Presidents are compared. Nevertheless it is a fittingly perfect reveal of the utter lack of fitness and character of the person currently occupying our highest level of government.
As Kayyem notes with some bitterness:
Trump has moved the goal post. That wasn't easy to do.
Mission accomplished.