Trump's first big test

Donald Trump heads for Texas on Tuesday for a first-hand look at the damage caused by Hurricane Harvey.  Reasonably enough, he will stay clear of the Houston area, probably spending most of his time at Corpus Christi, which is close to where the storm made landfall but which escaped most of the rain and damage.

The media are describing this as Trump's first big challenge since the election.  Will he rise to the occasion and actually manage to look "presidential" without an autocue on front of him?  Early signs are not good: as the storm hit, he pardoned the egregiously awful Sheriff Joe Arpaio and tweeted about his electoral victory in Missouri and a book written by one of his shrinking army of buddies.  In the meantime, there are all kinds of stories about how Trumpian policies are making the risks of Harvey-type events that much greater.

• No word on whether Trump thinks Hurricane Harvey is a Chinese hoax, but that's how he sees global warming. Drawing a direct line of causation between global warming and individual weather events is dangerous, and climatologists are resisting the temptation.  Still, the fact that we are seeing a weather event with no known precedent is surely instructive.

• Trump has cut the budget of the NOAA, which operates the National Hurricane Centre.  The NOAA has bemoaned the fact that its modeling of tropical weather systems is falling seriously behind that done in other countries, despite the regular arrival of deadly storms on US coasts. 

• The unwelcoming attitude of the Trump regime to immigrants may well make the reconstruction effort in Houston far more expensive and protracted than it would otherwise have been.  US unemployment is at a multi-year low and skilled trades such as construction and roofing are in particularly short supply. It appears that as many as 100,000 workers made their way across the border from Mexico to work on the rebuilding of New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina back in 2005.  How many will want to take the chance under today's circumstances?

The emergency management agency FEMA is already warning that it expects to be on the job in Houston and elsewhere in Texas for several years. Unfortunately for the people of that city, the same can also be said for Donald Trump.