Political strategy: Trump and Harvey

[usmbguest5318]

The question for th is thread is whether Trump will be merely transactional (bullet list items below) or strategic (final paragraph).


Hurricane Harvey is Donald Trump's first natural disaster as POTUS. I suspect that for the most part, Trump really can't screw-up "presidenting" his way through it. After all, what's a POTUS to do in such instances?

• Make clear that that one has charged one's staff to handle it with all due aplomb and alacrity.
• Assuage the feelings of hurt, loss, and angst among disaster victims and their loved ones.
• Visit the locality and be seen to look like one gives a damn.

Then, because there's a "silver lining" inside every rain cloud, avail oneself of it. In Trump's case that means parlaying/dovetailing the situation into a platform for reviving and engendering support for his infrastructure initiatives and perhaps (in a big stretch) for his tax proposals, though explicitly advance the latter on the back of the storm would look politically and disingenuously opportunistic rather than looking like sincere problem-solving, for the storm broke levies, which are part of infrastructure.

 

[usmbguest5318]

Well, Trump's made several remarks after the storm. Nothing that indicates he's availed himself of or even thought about the "silver lining" that's been surrounding him. Transactional as always. Sad.

 

[waltky]

Houston's Poorest Face Long, Uncertain Post-Harvey Recovery...

Houston's Poorest Face Long, Uncertain Post-Harvey Recovery
November 15, 2017 | NOTE TO READERS: This is the first of a three-part series on Houston's recovery.

Beside a black spore-infested mobile home in east Houston, Valerie Van Note lays the seats flat in the back of a Lincoln Navigator — one lent to her by a friend — and pats the bags of blankets and pillows she keeps neatly folded. "These are some of my dog beds I got to save," Van Note's gray eyes fill with tears as she remembers her three dogs that drowned in Hurricane Harvey's record floods in August. "I washed them, and I use them as a mattress." On August 26-30, the hurricane-turned-tropical storm Harvey stalled over southeast Texas, dumping a five-day total of 114 centimeters of water over parts of Houston.

Andrew Saldivar, left, removes a car battery given to him by a neighbor, which he later installed on a boat to save Houstonians still stranded by the floods.​

Roughly 25 percent to 30 percent of Houston's Harris County became submerged, running up a tab of $190 billion in losses — the costliest storm in U.S. history. Were it not for a floating spare tire, the five-day downpour might have taken Van Note's life, as it did that of at least 75 other Texans, 50 of whom drowned. But on the second day of heavy rain — a Sunday morning — Van Note paddled the tire past her porch and across the street with one hand, holding a small bag with some cash savings and prescription medicine in the other. She grabbed onto a pole where a neighbor would eventually see her and come to her rescue by boat.

Survivors, left behind

More than two months since the storm passed, the sports utility vehicle where Van Note sleeps at night is a temporary solution in a permanent struggle to find affordable housing and work. Like her neighbors, a mix of native-born and mixed-immigration status Houstonians, she finds every day a struggle in one of Houston's worst inundated areas — which had no luxuries to begin with. Within the circle of trailer homes on Spicewood Lane, residents feel the city has claimed recovery and moved on without ever checking on them. So they persevere on their own.

The trailer where Valerie Van Note once lived is uninhabitable since Hurricane Harvey hit Houston two months ago. Van Note how sleeps in a friend's sports utility vehicle, which is parked next to the trailer.​

During the day, Van Note collects scrap metal, but can't afford the gas required to transport and sell it. Between payments on a small storage unit and insurance on the Navigator — part of the deal with her friend — she exhausts $113 a month. With her Lone Star food stamps and some savings, Van Note has managed "just to survive," a common narrative in Houston's poorest residential areas by the Greens Bayou. She mostly stays put, keeping her neighbors' pets fed in the shade of the yard, next to the trailer where she previously lived, in case its 73-year-old owner — with whom she stayed as a companion — were to return.

"[Recovery is] going to take a long, long, long time," Van Note said.

"Months?"

"Years."

'Nothing is normal'