On October 12, the Rutherford County Sheriff’s Office in western North Carolina received a call about a man who had threatened to harm Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) workers responding to the aftermath of Hurricane Helene. The man, William Parsons, had made a Facebook post calling on others to “overtake” the site, writing that he was “sick and tired of the BS.” Parsons also reportedly runs Facebook pages in support of Donald Trump and in opposition to coronavirus vaccines.

Law enforcement officials arrived at the site to find Parsons armed with a pistol and a rifle. Parsons was arrested and charged with going armed to the terror of the public. After he was released on a $10,000 bond, however, Parsons told a different story. In an interview, he said that when he arrived at the site, there was “absolutely nothing there,” so he stayed and volunteered until police apprehended him at the scene.

Parsons’s change of tone is remarkable, but the damage had already been done. The reason Parsons found “nothing there” is that the site was partially cleared of FEMA workers before his arrival due to safety concerns. The safety measures came amid threats from him and many others, including rumors of armed militia groups targeting FEMA personnel that led FEMA administrator Deanne Criswell to temporarily suspend door-to-door operations.

Since FEMA’s creation during the Jimmy Carter administration, fringe conspiracy theories about “FEMA concentration camps” have figured into the worldview of far-right militia groups and commentators like Alex Jones. Facebook and other social media platforms have added fuel to the flames of right-wing FEMA paranoia.

More recently, Trump’s lies about FEMA undoubtedly factor into online misinformation about the recovery efforts following the hurricanes that have impacted the United States within the last month. During his presidency, Trump routinely made false claims related to disaster assistance and politicized the disbursement of desperately needed funds.

For example, Trump denied the reported death toll in Puerto Rico following Hurricanes Irma and Maria in 2017. Correspondingly, the Trump administration’s response to the disaster in Puerto Rico was considerably more robust than its efforts in Texas, where Hurricane Harvey had made landfall weeks earlier, despite the damage being more extensive in Puerto Rico. Additionally, according to interviews that the Guardian carried out with former Trump administration officials, Trump attempted to withhold wildfire relief efforts and funds from California and Washington on political grounds.

Given this history, it comes as no surprise that Trump’s incendiary rhetoric and outright lies are actively hindering recovery efforts throughout the southeastern United States from Hurricanes Helene and Milton. Within the last few weeks, Trump has asserted that the Biden administration is “abandoning” natural disaster survivors and that Kamala Harris has allocated “billions of dollars” of funds — what he calls “her FEMA money” — toward “housing for illegal immigrants.”

The Trump administration’s highly politicized responses to environmental catastrophes, both rhetorical and administrative, offer a glimpse at the stakes of a potential Trump second term, especially as extreme weather events become ever more common. If Trump’s obsession with the dissenting voices among his former officials and advisers indicates anything, it is that a second Trump administration would only have room for obedient foot soldiers who would not hold him accountable for punishing states that he considers politically unfriendly. Combined with his fast and loose attitude toward disaster relief, the writing is on the wall.

Although Trump’s Agenda 47 does not explicitly mention his plans for FEMA, one can expect that he would follow the conservative tack toward federalism, which would imply severely downsizing the agency. Project 2025, which Trump has (unconvincingly) disavowed, goes into considerable detail on FEMA. It is telling that the section on FEMA is authored by Ken Cuccinelli, a senior official in the Trump Department of Homeland Security. Cuccinelli is a climate denialist who led a legal harassment campaign of a climate scientist while serving as Virginia’s attorney general.

Project 2025 asserts baselessly that FEMA’s non-disaster funds, such as those allocated toward preparedness grants, are motivated by “political interests.” The conservative vision is to shift the cost burden of climate mitigation and resilience to the states. Project 2025 urges a dramatic shift in the cost-sharing arrangement, from 75 percent to 25 percent for “small disasters” and 100 percent to 75 percent for “truly catastrophic disasters.”

It is difficult to comprehend where the architects of this plan believe these funds, necessary for rebuilding communities and helping families regain their footing after losing everything, will come from. While much of the initial disaster relief would likely look the same, according to experts, infrastructure repairs and other long-term recovery efforts would fall upon already overburdened state budgets. In other words, Republicans would like to see state and local governments forced to raise taxes or divert funds from other public services, punishing the very people who would suffer the most from an environmental catastrophe.

Project 2025 also proposes winding down the National Flood Insurance Program (NFIP), which it alleges is subsidizing development in vulnerable flood zones and replacing it with private insurance. Of course, this proposal would leave homeowners at the mercy of profit incentives; private insurance providers have been known to systematically underpay claims, and the free market is notably hostile to the types of regulations that provide consumer protections — to say nothing of those that are needed to slow global warming.

The NFIP is not perfect and has been ridden with debt for many years, but it is also the majority provider of flood insurance to American homeowners. It has also been under assault by insurance lobbyists for attempting to collect climate-related data from insurance firms, hampering its ability to adequately calculate flood risk. The private sector is part of the problem, not the solution.

As Hurricane Helene so tragically illustrated in North Carolina, even parts of the country that were considered “safe” are within the impact zone of extreme weather events. Instead of treating the climate crisis with the urgency it requires, Trump has taken every opportunity to downplay and politicize the drastic impacts of climate-related disasters, tacitly encouraging conspiracy theories and violent threats like Parsons’s last week. The lasting impact of a second Trump term on the ability of FEMA to adequately provide disaster relief immediately following one of these events, and then to support climate resiliency endeavors to mitigate future destruction and taxpayer burden, would be devastating.