The huge storms battering America should all be called “Hurricane Trump”

This is all tied to Trump's policies!

“Trump’s rollback of climate change regulations will be felt far beyond his presidency,” screamed the headline of a 2019 CNN article that looked at how Donald Trump’s reversal of Obama-era climate change regulations will cause even more deadly hurricanes and storms in the future. As Dr. Michael E. Mann, the director of the Penn State Earth System Science Center told CNN at the time, Trump “is locking in permanent, irreversible damage to our environment through his irresponsible environmental policies, including his efforts to block progress on climate change.”

Countless other articles near the end of Trump’s administration warned that Trump’s actions where he “weakened or wiped out more than 125 rules and policies aimed at protecting the nation’s air, water and land” would come back to haunt of our nation.  And here we are.  

The alarming headlines today tell us that Hurricane Milton is bearing down on Florida, with 155 mph winds that have alarmingly expanded in range from 80 miles to 140 miles from its center--meaning its disastrous impact will be felt over a much larger area. As National Hurricane forecasters noted, “Milton has the potential to be one of the most destructive hurricanes on record for west-central Florida.”

Milton follows the deadly and devastating Hurricane Helene that has left at least 230 dead--making it the deadliest mainland hurricane since Katrina in 2005. Helene’s devastating flooding and storm surge has left a trail of destruction in its wake from Florida to Georgia to North Carolina estimated to cost in the area of more than $10 billion.

That is why these hurricanes--and any other ones of these sizes--should rightfully be named: “Hurricane Trump.”

Trump’s horrific mismanagement of the climate as President—which conjures up his failed handling of the Covid crisis—has brought us to where we are today with increasingly deadly and destructive storms.

For starters, Trump as President—through today—has consistently undermined the threat of climate change calling it everything from a “hoax” to a “myth.” In 2018, Trump even undermined the warnings based on his own administration’s data that unchecked global warming would wreak havoc on the US economy, saying, “I don't believe it."

But Trump fueling the hurricanes we see today went far beyond wars. For starters, he announced just six months into his presidency that the United States was withdrawing from the Paris Climate accord. As a reminder, when the Paris Agreement was concluded in 2015, it was hailed as a historic commitment by nearly 200 nations to reduce greenhouse gas emissions to “stave off the worst effects of climate change.”  

However, Trump-seeking to reward donors from oil companies—exited the agreement and aggressively rolled back regulations addressing climate change. (In fact, during this campaign, Trump point blank told oil industry executives if they donate $1 billion to his campaign, he will roll back Biden era-climate regulations so that they can make more profits despite the devastating impact that would cause with even more Helene and Milton type storms.)

Obviously, these storms are not caused solely by Trump’s conduct. But a December 2020 National Geographic article’s headline perfectly summed it up, “The most consequential impact of Trump’s climate policies? Wasted time.”

This article laid out in detail how Trump helped create the fuel for today’s super hurricanes. For example, they note Trump “rolled back policies that helped mitigate warming, relaxed regulations for climate polluters” and “changed rules about how much methane, a super-potent greenhouse gas, could be emitted as a byproduct of oil and gas drilling and from landfills.”

Trump also dismantled the Clean Power Plan, an Obama-era policy that aimed to reduce carbon emissions from the power sector to 32 percent below 2005 levels by 2030. As National Geographic explained, “That plan would have avoided about 70 million tons of emissions by this year and over 400 million tons by 2030.”  And Trump “weakened vehicle fuel efficiency standards,” yet enabling even more carbon emissions.

As experts have long warned us, hurricanes, and storms in general, become more intense and produce more rainfall as the temperatures of air and water rise. Andra Garner, a hurricane expert at Rowan University in New Jersey, told NPR, "We can see climate change fueling hurricanes."  This is all tied to “human-caused climate change” that has “trapped enormous amounts of extra heat on the planet, and most of that–over 90 percent–has been absorbed into the ocean.”  

How has Trump spoken of climate change in the 2024 campaign? Well in addition to offering to let oil tycoons write their own policies if they donate one billion dollars to his campaign, he continues to mock the threat of climate change. For example, Trump has stated at rallies to big cheers that, “The biggest threat is not global warming, where the ocean’s going to rise one-eighth of an inch over the next 400 years,” adding, “and you’ll have more oceanfront property, right?”  None of that makes sense given the water rising stat he cites is fabricated—as fact checkers note—and if oceans rise, it causes “coastal erosion, meaning less beach — not more.”

At a rally in Michigan, Trump further mocked climate change saying that “they used to say the term ‘global warming’ but now they say ‘climate change’ because the planet is getting cooler.” In reality, August saw the hottest month on record and marked “the 15th-consecutive month of record-high global temperatures.”

Worse than words, Project 2025 tells us what Trump has in store when it comes to climate change policy—and it’s all bad. Project 2025 calls for abolishing federal programs that address climate change and repealing Biden administration-backed laws that invest billions in funding in renewable energy as well as ending tax incentives for corporations and communities to adopt renewable energy.

If Trump wins, his policies will not only make our nation less safe from these super storms and the other devastating impacts of climate change—it will fuel even more death and destruction. Apparently, that is what Trump means by “making America great again.”

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