Denying Up a Storm

Is What THEY Do

You know about the veterinarian-taxidermist, whose motto was, "Either way you get your dog back." Politics is so often about having things either way, or if necessary no way, or, ideally, both.

            “I don’t not believe him, I don’t believe him,” J. D. Vance says when asked whether he believes Mark Robinson's denial of posting bizarre comments online. The most common way of putting that would be the other way around: "I don't believe him, I don't not believe him." Vance is not even committing whole-heartedly to the non-commital.

            Donald Trump is even more slippery. He tells supporters, (a) "If you don't vote, this will be the last election," and (b) if they do vote, this will be the last election. In the latter case, his contention is that no further election will ever be needed. So (a) is a warning and (b) is an assurance. Either one of them can sound like both.

            Here's something else Trump told a recent rally:

            "Is there anybody here that's going to vote for Kamila? Please raise your hand, please raise it."

            That takes 'em aback. Then he pops the whip:

            "Actually, I should say, don't raise your hand -- it would be very dangerous. We don't want to see anybody get hurt. Please don't raise your hand."

            Ideally, of course, politicians want not only to evade responsiblity, but also to dump it onto opponents: play defense and offense at once.

            Even when there’s a hurricane.

            "You know, it's largely a Republican area," Trump says of the states Helene has ravaged, "so -- some people say they did it for that reason, I don't even think they're that bad, but they probably -- maybe they are."

            If your syntax is shifty enough, you don't even have to define "they."    

            Timing. If you can blame others before others have even focussed on blaming anybody, then you have pre-emptively slipped the burden of denial from yourself to your enemies while they are, according to you, busy screwing up. Although Republican governors were thanking the federal government for its response to the horrors of Helene, Speaker of the House Mike Johnson wasn't having it:   

            "They [that is to say, FEMA, with Democrats in charge] had more than a week's notice of this, and yet we still have people who have not been served and even rescued. In North Carolina, it is a heartbreaking, tragic and infuriating situation to have the government fail, as they have well."

            It helps to be a bit oddly-spoken about exactly what accusations you are making: "have not been served and even rescued"? ... "have the government fail, as they have well"? Maybe, if that statement doesn't wear too well down the road, Johnson could take some of it back. "I said, 'as they have well' -- the media left out the 'well we're in this together . . .' part. As the media will!”

            But Congressman Johnson is not hedging much. How sincerely can his heart be breaking, if we can hear him licking his chops? He is plopping the ball of disputation into the court of those who still have their hands over-full responding to the storm itself. And for the nativist party, how fortuitous is this opportunity: to claim not only that FEMA is failing, but that it's failing because Democrats have been using it to help deal with immigration. They get to evoke getting-your-dog-back in several ways.

            Let me not be too one-sided — I may need to withdraw some of this under MAGA waterboarding. I do want to make this point, though: in response to Katrina, FEMA fell notoriously short. Republicans were in charge of FEMA then. I don't recall national Democrats using that fact to advance some tangential political football. After Michael D. Brown was fired as head of FEMA ("heckuva job, Brownie"), he said it was national Republicans who took advantage: They federalized Louisiana, and not Mississippi, because they didn't want to embarrass Mississippi's Republican governor, whereas Louisiana had "a white, female Democratic governor, and we have a chance to rub her nose in it."

            Andrew Young, a national Democrat and a native New Orleanian, had a philosophical take on Katrina, specifically on the fact that black people were hit hardest by that storm, at least most visibly hard, and were also sort of blamed for it, at least for its immediate aftermath. The whole mess was not just due to "a lack of preparedness," Young said, but largely to the  poverty-punishing way things go. "I was surprised and not surprised," said Young.