A man walks past an area flooded by the effects of Hurricane Helene near the Swannanoa river, Sept. 27, 2024, in Asheville, N.C.If there’s one thing the Trump administration loves, it is using any means available to force compliance with President Donald Trump’s uniquely hateful vision for the United States—and federal Emergency Management Agency funds are ideal for this. Disasters are unpredictable, so states and cities can never know when they might need aid from the federal government. But now, if they want a chunk of $1.9 billion in grants for things like search and rescue equipment and backup power systems, affected states and cities have to refrain from “limiting commercial relations specifically with Israeli companies.”
So, about that: There’s a little thing called the First Amendment, and it protects both freedom of speech and freedom of association. The government can’t compel you to associate with people with whom you disagree on ideological or religious grounds, nor can it force you to engage in speech that you object to. Indeed, that’s the entire foundation of evangelical Christian court cases demanding that they be allowed to refuse service to same-sex couples or literally anyone else that offends them.
Related | Trump team keeps finding exciting new ways to weaponize FEMA
Texas tried this gambit at the state level back in 2017, requiring any applicants for Hurricane Harvey rebuilding funds to say they wouldn’t boycott Israel. The ACLU had to step in to remind Texas of that pesky right to free speech. Additionally, as the ACLU of Texas legal director explained, such a requirement is “reminiscent of McCarthy-era loyalty oaths requiring Americans to disavow membership in the Communist party and other forms of ‘subversive’ activity.”
The administration keeps using fealty to Israel as a cudgel, equating any opposition to Israel’s actions as antisemitism. But it’s a hollow assertion belied by the administration’s own actions. Presumably, a genuine commitment to combating antisemitism would require not tapping openly antisemitic people for high-level jobs in the administration.
Instead, we’ve got Paul Ingrassia as head of the Office of Special Counsel—despite Ingrassia’s connections to extremist troll Andrew Tate, who routinely engages in antisemitic rhetoric and has performed Nazi salutes. Ingrassia is also a big fan of Nick Fuentes, who is just a professional racist and Holocaust denier. We’ve got the communications director for the Office of Management and Budget, Rachel Cauley, who gave a long interview to Counter-Currents, an openly white nationalist website whose editor-in-chief wrote a book about Adolph Hitler’s significance to the white nationalist struggle.
How about FBI Director Kash Patel, who went on Holocaust denier Stew Peters’ podcast eight times? Joe Kent, who just got confirmed by the Senate as the head of the National Counterterrorism Center, also enjoys giving interviews to Nazi sympathizers. However, the fiction that the administration is laser-focused on combating antisemitism has given it cover to do whatever it wants, so we just have to pretend Trump isn’t stocking his administration with Nazi-adjacent types.
This isn’t the only way that Trump has weaponized FEMA funding. In July, FEMA told states that they are required to spend part of their allocated federal terrorism funds to arrest migrants instead. There’s also the fact that the administration took FEMA money Congress had allocated to shelter migrants and is using it to build migrant prisons instead. And of course, there’s the selective distribution of aid, which somehow always goes to red states while being withheld from blue ones. Well, states with Democratic governors have gotten some relief, but only in states that voted for Trump in 2024.
This is not remotely how government is supposed to work. States aren’t obliged to agree with the president in order to get money when a disaster strikes. But given that Congress seems to have abdicated its role in overseeing the power of the purse, who is going to stop Trump from making that a precondition for anything and everything?