Thirteen years ago almost to this day, Hurricane Katrina struck the Gulf Coast, turning New Orleans into an underwater dystopia. All told, more than a million people were displaced, eight hundred thousand homes left without electricity, and nearly two thousand people killed.

There seemed to be little to no preparation for the coming disaster, exacerbating the eventual chaos. Then it took four days for George W. Bush, then on vacation, to make his way to the city, first flying over the disaster zone surveying the carnage before finally stepping foot on Louisiana soil, all while TVs beamed footage of Bush strumming a guitar in San Diego, giving a speech defending the Iraq War, and sharing a cake with John McCain. Tens of thousands of people were left stranded for days in the Louisiana Superdome without food, water, toilets, or other supplies, and once the recovery effort did begin, it was slow and strikingly racist.

The whole episode was a moral and political catastrophe that left a lasting stain on Bush’s presidency and sent his approval ratings plummeting to the low forties just a year after his re-election. Bush’s failure to muster the power of the presidency to save the lives of thousands of Americans — exactly the kind of activity he had staked his political career on, at least when it involved invading other countries — became arguably the biggest scandal of a scandal-filled administration, a benchmark for infamy that Obama’s opponents spent eight years trying to find an analogue for.