“Global warming is a total, and very expensive, hoax!” – Donald Trump, 2014
This weekend, as we look around the country, we see that a significant portion of the population is displaced, evacuated from their own homes because of wildfires, floods, winds, tornadoes, mudslides, or even failures of critical infrastructure like bridges, roads, and dams. This is not a new phenomenon—it’s familiar from the last several years, as the planet heats up. Winters are similarly cast, often with warmer temperatures and little snowfall, leading to summer challenges. The weather situations are felt not just in this country, but overseas as well, as a good part of Europe swelters under 100+ degree temperatures and droughts.
Since Trump returned to office in 2025, his administration has continued to eliminate regulated climate control protections and advance the use of contributors to the problem: oil, gas, and coal.
In a summer that has been marked with wrong assumptions (“It will be over in 4-6 weeks”), the war with Iran continues with negotiations faltering at every step. Our manmade instruments of war are sorely depleted, leaving us vulnerable to China and Russia in particular. Only the executive branch believes this is a war we can win, and what “winning” looks like grows vaguer every day. Where Ukraine is concerned, matters are equally problematic: our stockpiles are too low to continue to sell them war materials. There will be more to say in coming months about how a reckless defense department let us get to this vulnerable position without an exit strategy, or even a candid acknowledgment of the problem.
Twenty years ago at Washington Mutual, I led the company-wide crisis management team. The bank had locations in volatile parts of the country, like California (wildfires, earthquakes), Florida and Texas (hurricanes), and New York (terrorists, flooding). We mapped a playbook that led us through monthly internal scenario testing that included our partners at the local level – police, fire, public offices of emergency management, and the regional DHS representatives. At the state level, we worked with the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) to gather fellow crisis management leaders in banks to hold quarterly planning meetings based usually on the premise that the disaster would be so impactful that the banking sector would have to work together to deliver cash to its customers from damaged infrastructure. All that planning has paid off. Today in Seattle, the public and private sectors plan and manage large events together seamlessly, with few exceptions. But the incompetence at the highest level of governance puts such processes at risk.
Since the federal government has nominated a new head of FEMA (Federal Emergency Management Agency), it remains to be seen whether the federal-local or public-private partnerships will flourish as weather conditions deteriorate around the country. And we have yet to have a reckoning on federal costs incurred for natural disasters, to see if we’re spending more after the fact or on preventative measures that could be taken, especially in urban areas, to reduce the severity of disasters.
These past two weeks have been hard on the Pacific Northwest, with wildfires, high temperatures, and winds causing severe damage to property and homes in Eastern Washington and Oregon, not unlike the type of damage we saw last year in the urban wildfires in California. The focus on getting ahead of the fires has been there since the beginning, and at present over 1,500 personnel from more than 20 states and 100 jurisdictions (including Canada) have responded to the Spokane fires. Nearly 10,400 acres have burned, and over 60,000 residents have been evacuated from their homes. These numbers are not a hoax, nor are the fires, heat, and floods striking various parts of the country.
Since FEMA was created, its role began to evolve from its earliest definition. Today, despite attempts to put the agency out of business, FEMA has repeatedly delivered, through various leaders, by partnering with state and local entities and unchoking bureaucratic red tape. It remains the agency to go to in times of natural and man-made disasters. Further attempts by the Trump administration to eliminate it will be met with outrage since it has improved the conditions under which recovery can take place and the situations of those who have been displaced.
The underlying problem in the administration is a systemic distrust of expertise, as itself a change of governmental climate, in the catastrophic belief that collective and cooperative practice can be replaced by willful assertion of opinion. That is the real hoax, and it is a gathering tragedy.