DAVID MARCUS: It’s all aid, no wokeness in Trump’s West Virginia flood response
The devastating flooding in West Virginia on Feb. 15 that took two lives and caused upwards of $40 million in damage has been an early test of the Trump administration’s disaster response, and despite complaints that Trump is "gutting the government," so far, it has been a smooth success.
In part, this success is owing to the administration’s laser focus on providing aid, without the moralizing and social justice sentiments that marred recent disaster relief efforts under the watch of Joe Biden.
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Last week, Sen. Jim Justice, R-W.Va., and acting administrator of FEMA Cameron Hamilton visited the town of Welch, near the borders with Kentucky and Tennessee, to take in the devastation first-hand, and to show victims there exactly how their federal government is taking action.
"Figuring out the next steps and facilitating federal assistance to get folks back to a better place is what I was sent to Washington to do," Justice told Fox News Digital. "At the end of the day, getting back to our home states and helping folks deal with real issues impacting them is exactly why we as a party were able to win by such a wide margin."
And what were some of the forms of this federal assistance that Justice and Hamilton were in Welch, not just touting, but making flood victims aware of? In just over a month, several federal agencies have had a flood of their own, one of aid to the community.
FEMA, among other things, has made assistance for temporary housing available, something the Biden administration often struggled with. The Small Business Administration has declared a disaster in several counties and made loans available. The Department of Housing and Urban Development is making financing for repairs available, and the USDA is providing grocery assistance.
It is a whole-of-government approach that has left many residents grateful, such as local elementary school principal Sarah Diaz, who appreciated Justice’s visit to her school.
"It’s awesome to see how much he supports our families with all this tremendous loss that we’ve gone through and that we’re bouncing back and filled with resilience," Diaz, who told WVVA News. "We’re excited."
The kids, it seems, were most excited to see the senator’s famous pooch, Babydog, who is his constant and stalwart sidekick.
We all know that absence of evidence is not the same as evidence of absence, but six weeks into this disaster we are not seeing the kind of anger and frustration we saw in the wake of last fall’s North Carolina and Florida floods.
This time around, there were no federal officials telling responders to avoid houses with Trump signs, there were no photo ops offering a few hundred dollars as if it was like winning the Publishers Clearinghouse sweepstakes.
The real story here is that there is no story. Everything is working as it should be, which is something we were not accustomed to under Joe Biden.
It does and should make us wonder if FEMA, and who knows what other agencies, have been focused on their core missions or, rather, in pursuing utopian fantasies of equity and intersectionality.
After all, if FEMA was spending time and energy warning about imaginary violent Trump supporters then their eyes were not fully on the actual mission at hand.
The administration’s response to the flooding in West Virginia is evidence that the government can trim needless fat from programs and not only maintain strong levels of service, but improve upon them. This, of course, won’t stop Democrats from saying the sky is falling.
As Justice put it, "Watching Democrats run around the country with their hair on fire, defending damn-near fraudulent levels of wasteful expenditures, and calling President Trump every derogatory political term possible is a completely delusional hill to die on and quite frankly a waste of time. People across the country voted against this and the people of West Virginia overwhelmingly voted against this."
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For decades now, when Democrats are in charge of the Defense Department, or the FBI, or FEMA, we have heard agency leaders say again and again, "our first priority is diversity, or inclusion, or social justice," but that idea is plainly absurd.
The first priority of defense is winning conflicts, not diversity, the first priority of law enforcement is fighting crime, not equity, and the first priority of disaster relief is to help people, not to scapegoat Trump voters as violent.
If the situation on the ground in West Virginia today is any indication of how the Trump administration will handle disasters going forward then the country is in good hands.
After four years under Biden’s feckless and incompetent regime, this new approach is very welcome news.