Over the past week, President Donald Trump has focused almost solely on Hurricane Harvey and the devastation it has wrought on parts of Texas and Louisiana.
A few former presidents have been severely hurt by botched responses to natural disasters (think President George W. Bush and Hurricane Katrina), and Trump seems determined not to let that happen to him.
Michael Brown, a former Federal Emergency Management Administration chief, issued a warning to Trump about how the media will attack him over Harvey, Newsmax reported.
“Failure to fully bring on board the media — and that means CNN and anyone who may hate (Trump’s) guts — will result in big trouble for the president, even if he does everything right in disaster relief,” Brown explained in an interview with Newsmax.
Brown elaborated, saying that Trump needs to make sure he goes above and beyond to ensure that the media is made aware of every single thing he has been doing to help Texas and Louisiana recover from this devastating natural disaster, otherwise the media will attack him.
“(Trump’s disaster force) has to accommodate the media at every step of relief, bring them into everything they’re doing to rescue people from Harvey. And I emphasize — this includes all the media the president loathes and which loathes him,” he explained.
Brown also brought up his claim that CNN’s Anderson Cooper staged a rescue in Louisiana during the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in an attempt to show that FEMA wasn’t doing its job correctly.
“Anderson and his crew hijacked their own boat and freelanced a rescue of their own that they filmed. And then he went on the air to say, ‘See? We had to do the rescuing. FEMA wasn’t doing their job,’” he explained.
To be fair, Brown was fired in 2005 because FEMA actually wasn’t doing its job and failed to respond sufficiently to Katrina. However, Brown is right on target regarding his predictions of Trump and the mainstream media.
Even if Trump waded into the chest-high waters himself, pulled out six children, three puppies and five senior citizens, the media would probably talk about how Trump didn’t rescue anyone from a low income housing neighborhood and is thus a racist.
t’s a sad world we live in where the president can’t even respond to a hurricane without wondering how the media will spin this to attack him.
There is still much work to be done to help the people of Texas, but Trump has done a spectacular job so far of handling the crisis. Let’s hope he continues to do so and doesn’t give the media a chance to attack him.
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