Trump's hurricane of Milton lies: MAGA has a deadly addiction to disinformation

Of all the lies Donald Trump tells, perhaps the most preposterous is that he cares about his own voters. That was evident in 2020, when Trump repeatedly downplayed the threat of COVID-19, even calling the pandemic a "hoax." His followers got the message, risking their own lives first by refusing to socially distance and then, going further even than Trump himself, refusing to vaccinate. The result was that excess deaths were 43% higher for Republicans than Democrats in the months after the vaccines were released. Trump's lie killed his own voters by the thousands.

At the heart of Trump's pandemic lies was a sociopathic calculation: His lies and conspiracy theories would offset the loss of MAGA voters to COVID deaths. That bet did pay off, as most of the excess Republican deaths occurred after the election. Trump is making the same bet again in 2024 with his lies about Hurricanes Helene and Milton. He's spraying lies about the federal response that have rapidly spread throughout social media, convincing his followers to take risks with their own safety. His lies will kill people. He doesn't care, though, because he's betting that he can offset the losses by using these lies to turn out more voters.

The big lie Trump and his running mate, Sen. JD Vance of Ohio, are telling is that President Joe Biden has cut off federal help to hurricane-affected areas so that he can write fat checks to undocumented immigrants instead. Every word of this is a lie, of course. As state and local officials have repeatedly told the public, the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) has been working tirelessly to help people get to safety and to help them rebuild in the aftermath. There is also no evidence that "illegal" immigrants are being cut government checks, much less being put up in the lavish lifestyle the MAGA liars are claiming. And then there's the underlying implication that Republicans want to help. It's a lie. Many of the Republicans spreading misinformation amid natural disasters voted against FEMA funding mere weeks ago. Project 2025 outlines Trump's plan to decimate FEMA if he returns to the White House.

On Wednesday, Biden pushed back during a hurricane briefing, speaking directly to camera about Trump's "onslaught of lies" and reminding viewers that these lies harm "volunteers and first responders" who are "risking everything, including their own lives."

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On "The View," Vice President Kamala Harris called the lies "the height of irresponsibility and frankly callousness," adding that Trump "lacks empathy on a very basic level."

These lies during tragedy aren't just gross, but deadly. As we saw during the pandemic, Trump supporters will shape their behavior around his lies, either because they believe him or just as a show of loyalty to the MAGA cause. In this case, that could mean rejecting aid, ignoring calls to evacuate, or even threatening aid workers who they have been told are agents of the "deep state." As the American Red Cross said in a statement, "It also disrupts our ability to deliver critical aid and affects the disaster workers who have put their own lives on hold to assist those in need." One state official in North Carolina outlined how serious the threat is to Politico:

“The scale of the misinformation — and simply the number of posts and the eyeballs that each of those are being given online, particularly on [X] — that is what is different and truly scary,” the official said. “This has felt like you’re in the Thunderdome, and people are just piping this noise in. They create this great confusion. It creates chaos and a crisis moment where you need people to be able to work together and come together.”

The most immediate motive for Trump and Vance to lie is to win the November election. But there's no reason to think Trump will back away from this tactic if he successfully obtains office. If anything, it will get worse. Keeping people paranoid, confused, and unwilling to trust even basic information is standard operating procedure for anyone who aspires to be an authoritarian dictator, as Trump does. Trump spent his first term painting himself as a victim of "deep state" conspirators to justify his fascistic urges and seize more power illegally. He's just grown angrier and more dictatorial since. Chaos is to his benefit, so he'll try to increase it at every turn.

Nothing presents a greater opportunity to spread chaos than a crisis. Trump's instinct in these situations is to lie his head off, coaxing his followers to further alienate themselves from facts and put their trust solely in him. During his first term, this was most evident in the pandemic, where Trump would ping-pong between different lies at dizzying speed. On some days, the pandemic was a "hoax." On others, he told his followers they could cure COVID-19 with snake oil or even bleach. The point is to keep people unmoored from reality, making them easier to manipulate.

The "Democrats control the weather" lie truly underscores how much this is simply about sowing chaos. Even if you buy the asinine notion that it's possible, it still doesn't make sense. Why would Biden send a hurricane right before an election, when such things notoriously hurt incumbent parties? But the point is not to make sense, but the opposite. The point is to keep MAGA followers in a swirl of confusion and paranoia, so unattached to rationality that they likely will never find their way back to reason.

But it wasn't just the pandemic that drew out Trump's knee-jerk instinct to respond to every crisis with a storm of lies. In 2019, Trump was eager to sow as much panic as possible ahead of Hurricane Dorian, and so tweeted the storm would hit "harder than anticipated" and insisted, falsely, that Alabama was among the states affected. This was a dangerous lie, one that could disrupt emergency response. The Alabama weather service tweeted a correction, saying, "Alabama will NOT see any impact." Trump was so furious at having his falsehood corrected that he literally drew over a storm map, in hopes of tricking people into thinking Alabama was in danger.

Using threats of firing, Trump then forced officials at NOAA to publicly back his ridiculous lie. This whole incident tends to be remembered in a comical light, as the time Trump took a Sharpie to a map rather than admit he was wrong. But it's part of this larger pattern, where Trump systematically demonizes fact-based information, ham-fistedly replacing it with dark and chaotic lies. Some people, like NOAA officials, go along with the lies out of fear. But Trump's followers back the lies out of a misguided sense of loyalty and tribalism. They would rather spit on reality than admit liberals are right about something, even if rejecting the truth means risking their own health and safety.

There's also an addictive quality to the lies for MAGA diehards. Trump has trained his supporters to feel empowered by lying. It is reframed as a dominance move, as if they can conquer reality by sheer will. In reality, of course, MAGA followers are being bamboozled by a con artist. As Jamelle Bouie wrote in the New York Times, "To lie without shame about everything" is to "demand obedience to a narrative" and "cultivate the habits of autocracy." Trump's followers feel powerful when they lie, but they are selling off their freedom to a wannabe dictator. Or worse, when it comes to lies about viruses or hurricanes, they sacrifice their own lives for Trump's lies.