An MSNBC roundtable agreed this weekend that President Trump’s response to the coronavirus outbreak could be his Katrina moment, a reference, of course, to President George W. Bush’s much-maligned handling of the 2005 hurricane of the same name.
At this rate, Trump has suffered something like a dozen Katrinas, according to members of the press, and he has not even served a full term in office.
“I was thinking of this in terms of politics,” said MSNBC contributor Eddie Glaude Jr. “We talked about the business community finally not kind of sticking with Donald Trump. But this may be, and, Nicolle, I should mention this with a little trepidation, but this may be Donald Trump’s Katrina.”
MSNBC host Nicolle Wallace, who worked for the Bush administration, said with a smile, “Let’s just lean into that for a minute. I mean, Katrina was the moment when all the things that felt incredibly incompetent about the Bush presidency … were realized. We gave them a proof point that we were indeed incompetent and, also, people died. This has the making, structurally, for the same kind of moment.”
“If there’s any a moment to shake that 40%, the folks who would allow [Trump] to shoot someone [on Fifth Avenue]. If there’s any moment, it’s this one,” Glaude said, “because it’s babies. It’s friends. It’s loved ones. It’s old, helpless grandparents. It’s your nana. So, it seems to me this is an event that could take down a president.”
They are not wrong when they say the coronavirus outbreak has the potential to cause incredible harm in the United States. It may even be the thing that (finally) does in the Trump presidency. But, if the Wallace and Glaude back-and-forth sounds familiar, it should. For nearly every mishap that has happened since Trump’s inauguration in January 2017, there has been someone in the news media to declare it his Katrina.
“Could Harvey be Trump’s Katrina?” asked an op-ed published by the Christian Science Monitor in 2017.
The New York Times asked elsewhere before the hurricane had even fully settled, “How Does Harvey Compare With Hurricane Katrina?”
“12 years ago today, Katrina hit. Here’s how it compares with Harvey,” read a headline published a day later by CNN.
A Chicago Sun-Times op-ed declared later that same year of a different weather event, “Hurricane Maria is Trump’s Hurricane Katrina.”
“How Puerto Rico Is Becoming Trump’s Katrina,” Rolling Stone magazine declared of the same disaster.
Asked Vanity Fair, “Is the Crisis in Puerto Rico Becoming Trump’s Katrina?”
Members of the press were really invested that year in making the comparison.
Later, in 2018, the Atlantic’s Mallika Rao wrote on the “emotive images” of illegal immigrant families being separated at the border for an article titled “Trump’s Katrina Moment.”
Former New York Times executive editor Jill Abramson wrote elsewhere that year for the Guardian, “The forced separation of families is Trump’s ‘Katrina moment.’”
CNN’s chief legal analyst Jeffrey Toobin said the border crisis is “Trump’s Katrina.”
Wallace herself hosted a segment in 2018 titled “Why Family Separations May Be President Donald Trump’s ‘Katrina Moment.’”
Mercifully, we got a break from Katrina comparisons for most of 2019. But then, the coronavirus outbreak became a major international issue, so now, news media are back to referencing the 2005 hurricane that did irreparable damage to Louisiana and the Bush presidency.
It is a cliche, at this point, to say Trump is facing his own Katrina. We have done this so many times already that continued uses of the reference threaten to devalue the seriousness of the situations to which they are being applied.
You can cry “wolf” only so many times.
