Historians Will Not Write Kindly About This Time of Milton and MAGA

American in Turmoil, 27 days until the elections

This animation shows Milton as it intensified on October 7, with the heaviest rains (red) concentrated near the center. (photo: NASA)

Far away from Hurricane Milton and the U.S. election fever, I follow the news from the United States where history unfolds at breathtaking speed.

Someday, you will tell your kids or grandkids about those days when U.S. democracy was hanging by a thread. You will share memories of a man who loved foreign dictators more than the people he represented.

You will tell the story about this man to whom life had been kind. He had never been challenged, was spoiled by his wealthy parents, didn't need to fight for his country, nor ever understood the concept of doing so. He would have been far richer if he had put his father's money into stocks and bonds and never touched them from the tropical resort, where he could have lived his life in luxury without harming anyone.

However, he didn't recognize his failings and wanted to go into business. It was a complete failure by all standards; he went bankrupt a handful of times and always blamed others for mistakes. The one thing he was ever successful at was playing the role of a successful businessman.

Unfortunately, he then decided to run for the role of playing president. Once he landed in the White House, it was clear from day one that it was not a learning-on-the-job position. The apprentice of D.C. failed miserably, and his mismanagement of the pandemic led to the loss of hundreds of thousands of lives. Even amid that disaster, he cared more about serving a dictator he admired than serving the people. Many of those who had voted for him and followed him unquestioningly paid with their lives for their loyalty; non-vaccination was part of the cult around this well-vaccinated leader.

Just weeks before the presidential elections of 2024, two powerful hurricanes struck the U.S., killed hundreds of people, and destroyed houses and infrastructure in large areas in the southeast of the country. Climate change had fueled their extreme power, but his cult of followers collectively denied the science. One of his admirers was the Governor of Florida, who didn't even allow the use of the word climate change in government papers and believed that disaster funding was socialism.

While many Americans, independent of their political beliefs, showed admirable solidarity and kindness while cooperating to provide disaster relief, other Republicans did their best to make the federal government's response to help the millions of people in the disaster areas a failure. It's hard to believe so many years later, but they didn't care about the victims, even though many had voted for them. The Speaker of the House said there was no rush for further funding, and he ensured no extra money would be available to help the victims until after the elections. Others in the self-destructive cult, which was inexplicably known as Make America Great Again, sowed misinformation that made the lives of the most vulnerable Americans who had lost everything they owned even more miserable.

It was a post-truth society where a lie was at least as valid as the truth. When the Governor of Florida refused a call from the Vice President to coordinate the federal assistance even before the hurricane struck the west coast of the state, Republicans then blamed the Vice President for politicizing the aid; one of the countless examples of blaming the others for your own irresponsible behavior.

People will have forgotten the name of this governor, and nobody will remember a Republican Representative from Florida named Anna Paulina Luna. In the post-truth world where she lived, it was perfectly logical to demand more FEMA funding for Florida, which would have to be paid from the 20 billion dollar emergency funding bill she had voted against less than two weeks earlier, in the midst of the hurricane season. She was not alone; all Republican Representatives of Florida had voted against this bill.

Luna wrote in MAGA-patented all caps on a social media platform owned by a right-wing billionaire: "STOP ATTACKING RON AND DO YOUR JOB! @VP." Many people will have missed it since the information on the platform had become notoriously unreliable. It was sad to realize that this platform could have played an important role in helping people by providing factual information during the hurricane crises. Instead, it had sadly become a dark pool of lies, conspiracy theories, and disinformation.

People all over the world were worried about the elections in 2024. A wise, effective president, who was not a candidate for reelection, approved aid for the victims already days before the hurricane made landfall. Meanwhile, the apprentice president, fired in 2020 by the voters, didn't even think a Cat 5 storm existed. In the nearly forty years since buying his Mar-a-Lago Camelot in Florida, there had been 18 Category 5 Atlantic hurricanes. Four of them had made landfall in the U.S. during his presidency, but he still couldn't remember ever having heard of such a classification. It didn't stop him from claiming to be the effective leader the country needed to make it great again.

His concept of aiding hurricane victims was throwing paper towels at them and denying any further aid if disaster victims lived in areas that had not supported him in the elections or were Americans on an island without voting rights. Not hindered by the basic knowledge of hurricane categories, the self-proclaimed "stable genius" did believe that the use of nuclear weapons might be an effective measure against hurricanes.

And while the meteorologists cried, the people fled, and the world held their breath; the U.S. was hit for the second time by a massive hurricane.

By the time you read these words, history will unfold. I don't know the next chapter of this story. Still, the narrative so far may be retold for generations as a warning about the fragility of democracy and the vulnerability of our planet's ecosystem in the first phases of climate change.

I can't turn to the last page of this history book; we have to experience it together on this beautiful, challenged planet.