IS TRUMP REALLY A NATURAL DISASTER?

Yesterday I ran across this discussion between Megan McArdle of The Washington Post and Kat Rosenfield of The Free Press.

Real "oh my god, she admit it" moment here. Trump is treated as an uninteresting figure without agency so we can dump endless criticism on liberals for how they react to his "natural disaster." He "doesn't participate in moral frameworks" lmfao

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— Joey Politano🏳️‍🌈 (@josephpolitano.bsky.social) December 30, 2025 at 1:28 PM

(The original discussion is here if you want to read more from these folks. I don't.)

Unlike Joey Politano, I think McArdle and Rosenfield are half-right: Trump's character flaws ("flaws" is too mild a word for Trump's off-the-charts amorality) and America's right-wing partisans really do make moral shaming of Trump ineffective. Mostly it's Trump. He wallows in evil. He thinks evil runs the world. He also thinks evil is fun. I sometimes think he marries women just so he can have the pleasure of cheating on them; I think he'd rather make a dishonest dollar than an honest one. It occurs to me that he hasn't become Hitler or Stalin -- a dictator who has completely crushed all opposition parties, all opposition from the legal system, and all opposition from the media and ordinary citizens -- because having opponents to defeat is what gives his life flavor and meaning.

And I think Rosenfield is on to something when she calls Trump "a natural disaster in human form," if only because our system has allowed him to be as unchecked as a Category 5 hurricane. But she's missing an obvious point about natural disasters, which is that we don't just deal with them after they've been through.

Before a natural disaster, we board up windows, we evacuate, we pre-position supplies for relief efforts. Taking a few steps further back, we require buildings to be capable of withstanding diasters. And then after the fact, we need to do a better job than George W. Bush and his FEMA director did after Hurricane Katrina. I think that's what Rosenfield means.

But if you want to compare Trump to a phenomenon that can't be reasoned with, I'd choose a disease outbreak, not a natural disaster. Like Trump, natural disasters leave devastation in their wake that might take years or even decades to clean up, if it's ever fully cleaned up at all, but natural disasters pass -- hurricanes, earthquakes, and floods don't linger for months or years.

Disease outbreaks linger. They're amoral, like natural diasters or like Trump, but unlike natural disasters (and like Trump), they just keep going. What's important is "how everyone else deals with the carnage."

But we can anticipate disease epidemics and pandemics, just the way we were largely able to anticipate the horrible things Trump would do to America. We had the ability to vaccinate our system against Trump -- we had the Constitution, we had separation of powers, we had a free press. We had laws limiting a president's powers.

We could have educated a sufficient number of people to prevent the disease from ever getting a foothold in America, but we failed at that. Then, when the disease hit, Republicans in Congress and on the Supreme Court acted as the Robert Kennedy Juniors of our political system, thwarting any attempt to keep our body politic healthy. (The Supreme Court started in on that even before Trump won his second term.) The mainstream press wasn't sufficiently alarmed. The Democratic Party establishment cowered in a corner, hoping the disease would burn itself out.

Ordinary citizens and a few brave political actors are working hard to limit the worst consequences of the disease. But it's still spreading.

Rosenfield and McArdle think it's pointless to appeal to Trump's morality or empathy, and they're right. But this natural diaster, this deadly disease epidemic, has done untold damage because people like McArdle and Rosenfield aren't appealing to the morality or empathy of Trump's enablers, or the voters who enable the enablers, and haven't found a way to make them change their behavior. Many of the enablers -- Stephen Miller, Russell Vought, Kristi Noem, and dozens of others -- are as cold-blooded as the man they serve. Others, probably correctly, fear no consequences -- they know that as long as a rock-solid Republican propaganda apparatus keeps the GOP in power (or at least gives it permanent veto power, either in the courts or via the Senate filibuster), they'll remain powerful players and never fear legal consequences.

Can we ever make the enablers accountable? Can we limit their ability to be disease vectors?

I'm not sure, but we should try. McArdle and Rosenfield should try. But of course they won't.