11 November 20
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11 November 20
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Kareem Abdul-Jabbar | We May Be a Divided Nation, but We're United in Not Trusting the News Media
Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Los Angeles Times
Abdul-Jabbar writes: "Tuesday's election made clear, once again, how politically divided we are as a nation. But there's at least one thing Americans agree on across the political gulf: They don't trust the news media."
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Mike Pompeo. (photo: Drew Angerer/NYT)
Alarm Grows Over Trump's 'Dictator Moves' as He Denies Election Defeat
Stephen Collinson, CNN
Collinson writes: "President Donald Trump's administration is taking on the characteristics of a tottering regime - with its loyalty tests, destabilizing attacks on the military chain of command, a deepening bunker mentality and increasingly delusional claims of political victory."
In response, a visibly confident President-elect Joe Biden is going out of his way to project calm amid the deepening chaos, even as Trump and senior Republicans still refuse to acknowledge the President's defeat in a stunning break with America's democratic traditions.
Biden is taking calls with leaders of the country's top allies and appearing on camera, which reflects the inevitability of his ascent to power. Meanwhile the President is staying behind closed doors, tweeting in wild block capital letters and unleashing a purge of the Pentagon's civilian leadership in what one current defense official called "dictator moves." And William Cohen, former Secretary of Defense and Republican senator, told CNN's Don Lemon the administration's conduct is "more akin to a dictatorship than a democracy."
The President-elect is reassuring the American people with a composure granted by an election win that Trump's threadbare legal cases baselessly alleging massive voter fraud have little chance of overturning the will of the voters.
The President-elect on Tuesday consciously avoided escalating a confrontation with Trump, who is withholding the access and funding that incoming presidents normally rely on to stand up their administrations. But while Trump will remain President until January 20, an unmistakable symbolic transfer of authority is taking place despite Trump's efforts to deny his successor legitimacy.
"We don't see anything that's slowing us down, quite frankly," Biden said.
The President-elect has already crossed the necessary threshold of 270 electoral votes, according to projections from CNN and other major news outlets and has a chance of matching Trump's 2016 total of 306 electoral votes given his leads in Georgia and Arizona.
And more false accusations and conspiracy theories touted by Trump supporters to claim electoral fraud are dissolving, a day after Attorney General William Barr stepped into the political fray to advise prosecutors to probe major fraud.
The Department of Homeland Security meanwhile pushed back on rumors that ballots were cast on behalf of dead people.
But the Trump team only dug itself deeper into a bizarre parallel universe -- one where the President has already secured a second term -- consistent with the embrace of misinformation and alternative facts that has characterized the last four years.
Pompeo uses platform to advance electoral fraud claims
The administration's defiance took an even more ridiculous twist on Tuesday when Secretary of State Mike Pompeo showed his loyalty to a leader who shows no sign of working on key issues -- including a pandemic that has now landed more Americans in hospitals than ever before.
"There will be a smooth transition to a second Trump administration," Pompeo said. Asked whether Trump's refusal to concede undercut traditional US critiques of corrupt elections abroad, Pompeo rounded on a reporter: "That's ridiculous. And you know it's ridiculous, and you asked it because it's ridiculous." As recently as Monday, Pompeo issued a statement warning of electoral issues in Myanmar, which was long ruled by the military and has endured a difficult transition to semi-democracy where dissidents once looked at the US as a lodestar.
In Wilmington, Delaware, the President-elect pointedly refused to pour fuel on the fire, dismissing the idea that he needed to take legal action to release transition funds and making clear that he was confident that the process of assuming power would eventually work itself out.
He described Trump's behavior since Election Day as "an embarrassment" and after saying he was seeking to be tactful added: "It will not help the President's legacy." Asked whether Republicans would ever accept his victory, he said, "They will, they will," and he suggested with a half-smile that GOP senators were "mildly intimidated" by the President.
Biden, who once had a reputation as a windy public speaker, is showing a new persona to the American people. He noticeably chose his words carefully on Tuesday, putting on a show of calm, as he experiences the transformation that often comes over victorious candidates as they begin to assume the weight of the presidency after winning elections.
Pentagon purge
Trump by contrast is tarnishing the instruments of American democracy by refusing to concede and leaving the country more vulnerable with revenge firings that threaten to weaken critical national security agencies.
After Trump fired Defense Secretary Mark Esper, who had put loyalty to the Constitution ahead of his duty to the President, three other senior Pentagon officials have been fired or resigned. They include the department's top policy official, James Anderson, who resigned and is being replaced by retired Brigadier General Anthony Tata, whose nomination for the post earlier this summer foundered after CNN's KFile reported his numerous past Islamophobic and offensive remarks.
Sources told Barbara Starr and CNN's Pentagon team that the dismissals might be motivated by pushback from Esper and his team against a withdrawal from Afghanistan that would be carried out before the required conditions on the ground were met, and other pending security issues.
"This is scary, it's very unsettling," one defense official told CNN. "These are dictator moves."
Cohen, former Secretary of Defense and Republican senator, too called out the Trump administration's refusal to acknowledge Biden's win Tuesday night, saying "the way they are conducting themselves is more akin to a dictatorship than a democracy."
"I think that the State Department has been politicized, just like the DoD has tried to be politicized, and what we've done to undermine the intelligence community and other agencies, I think is consistent with what has been taking place for four years now," he said Tuesday.
A disputed transfer of power could offer US adversaries an opening, especially if there is a belief abroad that there is disarray in the national security infrastructure. Trump may next turn his ire on CIA Director Gina Haspel and FBI Director Christopher Wray, CNN's Jake Tapper has reported. Democratic Sen. Chris Murphy of Connecticut said on CNN International Tuesday that he feared the US was entering a dangerous period.
"I think (Trump) is going to be uniquely distracted from world events and national security," Murphy said. Former national security adviser John Bolton told CNN's Wolf Blitzer that Pompeo's comments on a Trump transition were "delusional."
"I think he has eviscerated his credibility internationally because I think there are very few people even in the US government who believe that is the case," Bolton said.
Trump's legal battle faces massive odds
Despite Trump's claims that his second term is being stolen from him, the President's legal claim has so far made no headway in its efforts to claim massive fraud. The gambit looks increasingly like a political exercise as Trump struggles to come to terms with his defeat while Republican senators scared of the President's political base refuse to cross him, especially with two Georgia runoff elections scheduled for January that will decide control of their chamber.
Trump's already minuscule opportunity to change the course of the election is diminishing by the day. Biden is now more than 46,000 votes ahead in Pennsylvania, is up by 12,000 in Georgia and has a lead of 14,000 ballots in Arizona. It is not clear whether there are sufficient remaining votes left in the Grand Canyon state for the President to overtake the President-elect.
As the Trump campaign filed a new long-shot lawsuit in Michigan, which Biden won by nearly than 150,000 votes, its communications director Tim Murtaugh said, "We do believe that ultimately President Trump will be declared the winner of this election."
But Benjamin Ginsberg, a veteran Republican election lawyer, said that the Trump campaign "was a long way from nowhere" in its quest to overturn the outcome of the election.
"To win cases, they have to put enough results into play to change the outcome of the election in individual states and in none of the suits they have filed around the country are they anywhere close to doing that in any state," Ginsberg said on CNN's "The Situation Room."
Still, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell dug in Tuesday on his insistence that Trump was within his rights to pursue his complaints.
"I think we ought to quit all the hand-wringing and not act like this is extraordinary," the newly reelected Kentucky Republican said.
"We're going to get through this period and we'll swear in the winner on January the 20th, 2021, just like we have every four years since 1793."
While many observers believe McConnell is playing a long political game -- with the Georgia runoffs and the 2022 midterm congressional elections in mind -- the silence of Republican senators is emboldening Trump's intransigence.
The world has already moved on
But while GOP lawmakers aren't willing to break with the President, many world leaders are moving to embrace Biden -- including a number of whom who saw themselves as ideological counterparts of the President.
Biden's campaign released statements on the President-elect's calls with the leaders of France, Germany and Ireland. Biden also spoke to British Prime Minister Boris Johnson, whose populist leanings made him a good fit with Trump. Johnson promised to work with Biden in a post-Covid-19 era.
Even Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, who bonded with Trump over their common strongman tendencies, issued a public message congratulating Biden on his "election success." And Saudi King Salman and Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman -- who has a close and controversial relationship with Trump and his son-in-law Jared Kushner -- sent Biden a cable in which they conveyed congratulations on "His Excellency's victory in the presidential elections."
Biden said he had a simple message for all the world leaders: "I am letting them know America is back."
Bernie Sanders. (photo: The Hill)
Bernie Sanders Is Actively Running for Labor Secretary
Hamilton Nolan, In These Times
Nolan writes: "The news that Sanders is still trying for the position is sure to energize progressives."
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Joe Biden. (photo: Getty Images)
Joe Biden Can Quickly Reverse Many of Donald Trump's Immigration Policies, Experts Say
Julián Aguilar, The Texas Tribune
Aguilar writes: "Biden can unwind many Trump policies the same way they were created, via executive order, but bigger immigration reforms will depend on how much Congress is willing to take on, experts say."
t took less than a half hour after the presidential election was called for President-elect Joe Biden on Saturday before Krish O’Mara Vignarajah tweeted her thoughts on what she expected from the incoming administration.
“We will, day-in and day-out, hold the Biden administration accountable to its promises to immigrants, refugees, DREAMers, and the American people,” she wrote. “And together, we can and we will build a fair and humane immigration system that reflects our better angels.”
As the president and CEO of Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Service, Vignarajah was one of several immigrant rights leaders who decried President Donald Trump’s decision last month to cut the annual refugee limit to 15,000, the lowest ceiling in the history of the 40-year-old resettlement program — down from 30,000 in 2019 and 45,000 in 2018.
The refugee limit was the latest in a four-year string of hard-line actions by the Trump administration to curb legal and unauthorized immigration to the United States, one of the areas where Trump has had more successes than failures in delivering on his campaign promises.
With the election decided — although Trump has not conceded and his campaign has filed lawsuits in multiple states to contest the results — how quickly a Biden administration can begin to reverse course on Trump’s immigration policies depends on several factors. They include how far-reaching the policies are, what Biden can accomplish via executive order and whether Congress has an appetite to take on such measures amid other priorities like the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic and the country’s economic recession.
Sarah Pierce, an analyst at the Migration Policy Institute, a Washington, D.C.-based policy think tank, said one of the issues Biden can tackle quickly is also one of the most popular and controversial: the Obama-era Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program.
The 2012 program provided renewable, two-year work permits and a reprieve from deportation to hundreds of thousands of immigrants who were brought into the U.S. as children; it was open to undocumented immigrants who came to the country before they were 16 and who were 30 or younger as of June 2012. Roughly 107,000 Texans had DACA permits as of December 2019, according to federal statistics.
Trump announced in 2017 he was ending the program, but the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in June that was inappropriately terminated.
“Reinstating DACA to its full force would likely only require a memo,” Pierce said. “And it would mean opening [the program] up to more than 400,000 young foreign nationals who are immediately eligible for DACA benefits but unable to apply.”
A Trump administration policy that’s had a big impact on the border, the Migrant Protection Protocols, might not be as easy to eliminate, Pierce said. The policy, known as “remain in Mexico,” was enacted in late 2018 in California and a few months later in the El Paso-Ciudad Juárez region before expanding to other major population centers along the Texas-Mexico border.
The Migrant Protection Protocols require that most asylum seekers wait in Mexico for their court dates in front of American immigration judges. More than 67,000 asylum seekers have been sent back to Mexico, including more than 20,000 in the El Paso-Ciudad Juárez area, since the program’s inception.
“Procedurally that would likely require little more than a policy memo — that is actually how it was created,” Pierce said. “But there will be a lot of questions about what to do with the … individuals who are currently or were previously enrolled in MPP. Those questions will present a lot of political and logistical difficulties for the new administration.”
The Mexican government would likely be included in those discussions, but Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador is one of the few world leaders who has not congratulated Biden. Instead, López Obrador — or AMLO, as he’s commonly referred to — said he was going to wait until any legal disputes over the U.S. election were resolved.
Duncan Wood, the director of the Mexico Institute at the Washington, D.C.-based Wilson Center, said López Obrador’s decision to wait was somewhat surprising but won’t be a major diplomatic issue once the election results are finalized.
“It sends the message that the president himself isn’t interested and isn’t excited about working with a new president of the U.S.,” Wood said. “But it’s unlikely to have long-term ramifications just because of the nature of the relationship.”
In 2019, Trump threatened to shut down the southern border if Mexico didn’t do more to stop caravans of migrants from Central America from traveling through Mexico en route to the United States. López Obrador responded to the threats by sending federal troops to his country’s northern border to prevent the migrants from entering the United States and by keeping asylum seekers in makeshift encampments south of the Rio Grande.
Wood said he expected a Biden administration to take a more traditional approach with Mexico that includes dialogue and offers of U.S. aid.
“It’s going to be very difficult for a Biden administration to relax or to end the cooperation with Mexico on stopping the flow of Central Americans northward,” he said.
On construction of the border wall, which Trump made a signature issue of his 2016 campaign, Biden can immediately end Trump’s 2019 emergency declaration that allowed him to transfer billions in Department of Defense construction and payroll funds to finance the border barrier. But it’s unclear what would become of the funds that were transferred but haven’t been used, said Jessica Bolter, a Migration Policy Institute policy analyst.
“Ending the transfer of future funds doesn’t mean in itself that wall construction stops,” she said. “If Biden wants to follow through with his promise not to build another foot of wall, his administration could [also] terminate current contracts for wall construction, possibly even if they’re in the middle of construction, which the government does have a lot of leeway to do.”
There are also pending federal lawsuits in Texas about the Trump administration’s use of eminent domain to acquire private land to build more miles of barrier. The litigation has stalled construction so far in Webb and Zapata counties. But those lawsuits would be a moot point if Biden decides to stop new construction altogether.
The president-elect has also promised to send to the next Congress a bill to provide a path toward legal status for the millions of undocumented immigrants in the United States. But addressing the ongoing pandemic and the economic recession it has caused will likely be a bigger immediate priority, said Muzaffar Chishti, a senior fellow at the MPI.
“That makes, I think, real progress on some other important issues very difficult for the immediate future,” Chishti said.
'Oregon, like other states that have relaxed their drug laws, didn't do so because political leaders woke up to the problem and pushed serious reforms.' (image: Christina Animashaun/Vox)
America's War on Drugs Has Failed. Oregon Is Showing a Way Out.
German Lopez, Vox
Lopez writes: "The central pillar of the country's drug war is criminal prohibition - even simple possession of illegal substances carries the threat of jail or prison time. Oregon is chipping away at that regime, if not dismantling it entirely."
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Clockwise from top left: Donald Trump, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, Matteo Salvini, Janez Janša, Jair Bolsonaro, Marine Le Pen, Viktor Orbán, and Thierry Baudet. (image: Carlos Barria/Henry Romero/Francisco Seco/Stefano Carofei/Nicolad Messyas/Robin Utrecht/Rex/Reuters)
End of Trump Era Deals Heavy Blow to Rightwing Populist Leaders Worldwide
Shaun Walker, Tom Phillips and Jon Henley, Guardian UK
Excerpt: "As the Donald Trump era draws to a close, many world leaders are breathing a sigh of relief. But Trump's ideological kindred spirits - rightwing populists in office in Brazil, Hungary, Slovenia and elsewhere - are instead taking a sharp breath."
The end of the Trump presidency may not mean the beginning of their demise, but it certainly strips them of a powerful motivational factor, and also alters the global political atmosphere, which in recent years had seemed to be slowly tilting in their favour, at least until the onset of coronavirus. The momentous US election result is further evidence that the much-talked-about “populist wave” of recent years may be subsiding.
For Brazil’s president, Jair Bolsonaro, who has yet to recognise Joe Biden’s victory, Trump’s dismissal struck close to home. “He was really banking on a Trump victory … Bolsonaro knows that part of his project depends on Trump,” said Guilherme Casarões, a political scientist from Getulio Vargas Foundation in Brazil.
As the reality of a Trump-free future sunk in last Thursday, Bolsonaro reportedly sought to lighten the mood in the presidential palace, telling ministers he now had little choice but to hurl his pro-Trump foreign policy guru, Filipe Martins, from the building’s third-floor window.
The election result represented a blow to Bolsonarismo, a far-right political project modelled closely on Trumpism that may now lose some of its shine. And on the world stage the result means Brazil has lost a key ally, even if critics say the relationship brought few tangible benefits. It brings an end to what Eliane Cantanhêde, a prominent political commentator, called Bolsonaro’s “megalomaniacal pipedream” of spearheading an international rightwing crusade.
“Without Trump, who’s going to lead this? Brazil, Poland and Hungary?” Cantanhêde said. “The party’s over ... No one was taking this seriously anyway – but now without Trump, they’ll just laugh.”
Hungary’s prime minister, Viktor Orbán, whom Trump’s former strategist Steve Bannon once called “Trump before Trump”, had also set out his stall firmly behind the incumbent before the vote, saying he had no plan B in the event of a Trump loss.
Hungary’s prime minister, Viktor Orbán, whom Trump’s former strategist Steve Bannon once called “Trump before Trump”, had also set out his stall firmly behind the incumbent before the vote, saying he had no plan B in the event of a Trump loss.
“I am convinced that President Trump has saved conservative America and become one of the greatest American presidents. We wish him, and ourselves, total success in his election,” Orbán said shortly before the vote.
Trump’s White House has given tacit backing and sometimes open support to far-right movements and leaders. Trump sent an old friend, the jewellery magnate David Cornstein, to be ambassador in Budapest and flatter Orbán, while his ambassador to Germany, Richard Grenell, said he planned to “empower” rightwing forces across Europe, infuriating his German hosts.
Orbán said his support for Trump was partly because Hungary was tired of being lectured by Democratic politicians. “We didn’t like it and we don’t want a second helping,” he said.
Cas Mudde, a professor of international affairs at the University of Georgia, said it was the prospect of this kind of criticism under Biden, rather than any concrete political benefits of Trump per se, that was behind European illiberal politicians’ embrace of Trump.
“I doubt most far-right leaders will feel their electoral success is going to be impacted by Trump’s defeat. Neither will it really change their access to the White House, which was limited under Trump too,” he said.
“What they mainly worry about is what Orbán has called ‘liberal imperialism’ – having the US criticise democratic erosion and the abuse of human rights around the world again.”
Most populist leaders waited as long as possible for the results before grudgingly congratulating Biden, or simply remaining quiet. Orbán sent belated congratulations on Sunday, but Hungarian and Polish state television played up Trump’s claims of fraud and suggested the result was still in the balance.
Mexico’s president, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, commonly called AMLO, declined to congratulate Biden immediately, saying he would wait until all legal challenges had been settled. “We want to be prudent,” López Obrador said on Saturday.
Observers see stylistic similarities between the two leaders, despite the fact AMLO was elected on a leftwing populist platform. He questioned the US media on Monday for “censoring” Trump’s recent press conference by cutting coverage over false claims being made.
Slovenia’s prime minister, Janez Janša, went further, calling the election for Trump on Wednesday morning. Janša, who has a Trumpian relationship with his Twitter feed, wrote that it was “pretty clear” Trump had won four more years in office. “More delays and facts denying from #MSM, bigger the final triumph for #POTUS,” he wrote.
Since then, he has said Slovenia will continue to be partners with the US, though he also tweeted a number of times that the timing of Monday’s announcement on a potential coronavirus vaccine breakthrough was suspicious and perhaps had been deliberately withheld until after the election.
In Estonia, where the far-right EKRE party was brought into a coalition government last year, remarks on Trump by the party leader and interior minister, Mart Helme, led to a full-blown political crisis. Helme, who described Biden and his son Hunter as “corrupt characters”, said he believed Trump would be declared the winner in the end. “It will happen as a result of an immense struggle, maybe even bloodshed but justice will win in the end,” he said.
President Kersti Kaljulaid said over the weekend that she was “sad and embarrassed” by the remarks and suggested the attack on Estonia’s main ally was a national security threat. On Monday, Helme resigned.
Not everyone in the European far right is eager to die on the hill of Trump’s evidence-free claims of electoral fraud, however, particularly in those countries where most voters tend to be sceptical of the brash US president.
In France, where according to one pre-election poll only 14% of voters wanted Trump to win, the far-right National Rally leader Marine Le Pen seemed keen not to rock any boats before next year’s presidential elections.
Although she hailed Trump’s victory in 2016, and suggested after last week’s vote that he was “on the side of history”, she has conspicuously declined to follow several of her party officials in relaying false claims from the Trump campaign of mass electoral fraud, prompting speculation that she fears risking her domestic credibility by associating herself too strongly with the Trump cause.
In the Netherlands, Thierry Baudet, leader of the far-right Forum for Democracy, and his rival, Geert Wilders of the anti-Islam Party for Freedom, both of whom backed Trump in the election, have made little noise in the aftermath.
In Italy, the League leader, Matteo Salvini, who wore a “Trump 2020” face mask before the elections, has been silent since the Biden win, though he did restate the claims of voter fraud late last week. Giorgia Meloni, his coalition partner and Brothers of Italy leader, said Biden had “Covid to thank” for his victory.
Mudde said Trump, with his “America First” rhetoric, was always a tricky figure for large parts of the European far right, especially in countries that have strong anti-American sentiment.
“Bolsonaro is much more like Trump than Le Pen or Salvini. The latter are ideological far-right politicians, steeped in a far-right subculture; Bolsonaro is a conservative-turned-far-right, unconnected to party or subculture, and therefore ideologically thin and flexible,” he said.
Some observers believe Bolsonaro will be forced to moderate his politics by Trump’s loss. Many expect him to retire his Trump-admiring foreign minister, Ernesto Araújo, who has hailed the US president as the “saviour” of the west.
“The foreign minister is of no use in a post-Trumpian world,” said Oliver Stuenkel, an international relations specialist. “He was a one-issue foreign minister: to admire and adulate Donald Trump and propagate Trumpist ideas.”
In Europe, opponents of populism hope the change in the White House will have a similar knock-on effect. “President Trump was good for the Orbán government, President Biden will be good for Hungary,” Gergely Karácsony, the opposition mayor of Budapest, wrote on Facebook.
An aerial view of flood waters from Hurricane Delta surrounding structures destroyed by Hurricane Laura on October 10, 2020 in Creole, Louisiana. (photo: Mario Tama/Getty Images)
29 Storms and Counting: The Story Behind the Atlantic's Super-Active Hurricane Season
Zoya Teirstein, Grist
Teirstein writes: "The Atlantic Ocean has spawned a seemingly endless string of tropical storms and hurricanes this year."
n Monday night, the 29th named storm of the 2020 Atlantic hurricane season formed in the northeast Atlantic. As of right now, the subtropical storm doesn’t threaten any communities or coastlines, but Theta has demolished the 2005 record — 28 named storms — for the greatest number of named storms in an Atlantic season. Tropical cyclones get names when their maximum sustained winds reach a minimum of 39 miles per hour. The World Meteorological Organization says there’s a 70 percent chance a 30th named storm will form in the next five days.
The Atlantic Ocean has spawned a seemingly endless string of tropical storms and hurricanes this year. The season broke records early and often, starting on June 2 when Tropical Storm Cristobal became the earliest “C” named storm to form in an Atlantic season. (Atlantic storms are named in alphabetical order; Cristobal was the third named storm of the season.) After drenching Central America and Mexico, Cristobal moved into the Gulf Coast and upper Midwest, triggering storm surge, flash flooding, and tornadoes. Cristobal seemed unusually early at the time, but the months that followed proved the storm was not an anomaly. In total, 25 of the 28 named storms that occurred before Theta were the earliest named storms for their position in the alphabet — and then the Greek alphabet —on record.
The sheer volume of storms might seem like a foreboding sign of years to come. Climate scientists say warming ocean temperatures and rising sea levels have already influenced the severity of some storms and will lead to more intense storms in the future. It’s important to note, however, that scientists are not in agreement that rising temperatures are affecting the frequency or timing of tropical storms and hurricanes.
As the New York Times points out, there are two major reasons — neither related to climate change — for the record number of named storms this year. The first is the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation, a sea-surface temperature pattern in the North Atlantic that has been in a warming phase for the past couple of decades. Those warmer ocean temperatures in the tropical Atlantic Ocean and Caribbean Sea helped create the conditions for the 29 named storms we’ve seen so far, in part because the cyclical pattern contributed to a powerful African monsoon season and reduced wind shear that could have helped waylay storms.
Another reason for the volume of named storms is how far storm-tracking technologies have come in recent years. The tools meteorologists use to locate, identify, and track disturbances have gotten better over time. Some of the storms that broke records this season but didn’t touch a landmass might not have been detected in previous seasons.
In terms of major hurricanes — Category 3 storms and higher, with maximum winds at least 111 miles per hour — 2005 still holds the record. That year, eight hurricanes met the Category 3 threshold. Three of them hit Category 5 status, an unprecedented development.
But even with all the caveats around the 2020 record, there was something truly record-breaking about this year’s season: the number of times major storms cut through the Gulf Coast, especially Louisiana. Storm-weary residents of coastal Louisiana braced for seven tropical storm forecasts this season, and five of them made landfall — breaking a record set in 2002, when four storms plagued the state. Two of this year’s storms, Laura and Delta, trampled near-identical paths through the state slightly more than six weeks apart from each other. Some Louisiana towns, like Lake Charles, were still facing years of recovery from Hurricane Laura when Hurricane Delta made landfall. More recently, Hurricane Zeta, a Category 2 storm, made landfall about 65 miles southwest of New Orleans and knocked out power for millions in Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, Tennessee, and the Carolinas. The compounding effect of back-to-back hurricanes had catastrophic consequences for the region.
It’ll be a long time before Louisiana is fully back up on its feet. That’s not just a short-term problem (though the state might have to contend with another storm before the season is through); it’s the Achilles’ heel of coastal, hurricane-prone states. This busy Atlantic hurricane season has illuminated the recklessness of rebuilding infrastructure, businesses, and homes in exactly the same way in exactly the same places after exactly the same disasters.
The foolhardiness of expecting a different result while doing little to change the odds of survival extends beyond hurricanes. The same deal applies to areas ravaged by wildfires, cities plagued by flooding due to sea-level rise, and a host of other issues that are becoming harder to ignore in our warming world. At some point in the near future, American communities will have to take stock of whether living at the mouths of densely-wooded canyons, in neighborhoods that flood on sunny days, and on the thin stretches of real estate where land meets the sea is worth it. This isn’t a problem that most individuals can solve, not least because plenty of the people who live in these places don’t have the means to up and move on their own. It’s up to the government to help them make the right choices.
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