photo by: Contributed

Froma Harrop

The tricks Donald Trump tried to play on the recent hurricane victims were beyond depraved. Here were people suffering major losses, their lives stopped in a hellscape of tattered roofs, ruined possessions and, in some cases, a pile of debris where their home once stood. And there was Trump making their lives more miserable as a tactic to fool them into blaming their distress on his political foes. Could these hurricane survivors see what was being done to them?

Trump’s targets this time weren’t foreigners with dark skin. The migrants from Haiti knew they weren’t eating people’s pets. They knew they were being used as scapegoats.

By contrast, the smashed-up communities in North Carolina and Georgia are places heavy with his potential voters. How many identified the two-step dance in which Trump tried to obscure how much help was available?

Trump executed the sly trick of telling folks that FEMA is offering $750, leaving the impression that was all. The $750 was immediate help to cover essentials like food, diapers and water. FEMA could also provide $42,000 or more for home repairs and other services. Trump left that out.

He sported with the lie that Joe Biden hadn’t reached out to Georgia’s Gov. Brian Kemp. Kemp said he had initially missed a call from Biden, and when they connected, the president just said, “Hey, what do you need?” And Kemp wasn’t the only state and local Republican trying to stop the sick games being played on his constituents.

Chuck Edwards, a North Carolina Republican representing hard-hit mountain areas, had to put out a press release denouncing the hoaxes and conspiracy theories being spread about the FEMA response. Trump wasn’t the source of all of them, but he did nothing to dissuade his ally Elon Musk from letting his lies and other misinformation spread like mold on his X social media site.

It wasn’t true, as Trump insisted, that FEMA was out of money because it had been spent on housing illegal migrants. Nor did he counter dangerous rumors of unclear origin. They were useful, after all.

And no, FEMA was not confiscating the properties of hurricane survivors who applied for disaster assistance when their homes were deemed unlivable.

In a social media post, Trump said of North Carolina, “I’ll be there shortly, but don’t like the reports that I’m getting about the Federal Government, and the Democrat Governor of the State, going out of their way to not help people in Republican areas.” Totally made up.

FEMA workers were bombarded with threats. The absolute bottom was hit when a 44-year-old man in North Carolina, brandishing a rifle and handgun, menaced FEMA employees trying to help distressed residents. This reminded some of the terrible old days when urban gang members would shoot at firefighters trying to save lives.

There have always been creeps who use disasters to con victims of their money or sadistically inflict more pain. What’s new is that one of the creeps is now a former president running for another term.

When you surrender to the MAGA media bubble, you don’t get to choose which items confirm your prejudices, which ones hurt you in service of making you mad at people Trump wants you to be mad at. Some may wake up to the cruel manipulation. Others will be victims to the end.

Which brings up a consideration that may sound ungenerous, but here goes: If some of the hurricane victims don’t obtain available help because they’ve chosen to believe MAGA and its media allies, must others feel sorry for them?

We don’t have to answer. It may be sufficient to simply note that some people just can’t be helped.

— Froma Harrop is a syndicated columnist with Creators.