Rachel Maddow drew parallels on Monday night between the Trump administration’s response to the July 4 flood in Texas and George W. Bush’s infamously disastrous handling of Hurricane Katrina in 2005.
“Do you know who this person is? It’s okay if you don’t,” Maddow began Monday’s episode of “The Rachel Maddow Show,” showing a photo of FEMA Director David Richardson in Texas this past weekend. The MSNBC host then went on a small detour to discuss Michael D. Brown, aka “Brownie,” who was appointed by President George W. Bush in 2003 to lead FEMA. “This is a man whose main experience in disasters was that he had caused some minor organizational disasters in his tenure as head of an Arabian horse association,” Maddow explained.
“How did he end up at FEMA?” She asked. “I don’t know. He was a friend of George W. Bush’s campaign manager, and he was a Republican.”
Pulling up a photo of Bush looking down on the hurricane-ravaged New Orleans “like he was enjoying his trip to the aquarium,” Maddow continued, “Bush never could quite answer why he praised Brownie, why he praised his FEMA director, Michael Brown, for doing a ‘heck of a job,’ or more importantly, why he put this guy — why he’d put the Arabian horse association guy with zero disaster experience — in that job in the first place.”
Pivoting back to Trump and Richardson, Maddow told viewers, “The first time anybody had seen hide nor hair of President Donald Trump’s man running FEMA after one of the biggest floods in this country in decades was this weekend when he finally showed up.” You can watch the full “Rachel Maddow Show” segment yourself in the video below.
Maddow continued to break down the Trump administration’s response to the Texas flooding. “In the immediate aftermath of the flood, Trump’s Homeland Security department, of which FEMA is a part, they apparently forgot or at least neglected to extend the contract to pay the people who answer the phones when you call FEMA for help,” the MSNBC host noted. “So all the people at the FEMA call center got fired on July 5, and more than 80% of calls for help after the flood did not get answered.”
Referencing a photo of Richardson talking to a younger Texas man, Maddow impersonated the FEMA director, dryly advising, “Image is everything, young man. You definitely don’t want to make the kinds of insensitive mistakes that other people have very famously made after disasters like this in our country.” While displaying another photo of Richardson watching the Texas wreckage from a helicopter side by side with Bush’s infamous Katrina plane image, Maddow added, “Make sure you don’t make any of these exact same mistakes.”
“Have I mentioned that Trump’s FEMA pick is the first person to run FEMA since Brownie who has no disaster response or emergency management experience at all?” Maddow added. “He did remember that great photo of George W. Bush, though, and made sure to take pains to replicate it exactly this weekend.”
