Last week, Republican Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia posted a map on X to show Hurricane Helene’s path overlapping with majority-Republican areas in the South. She followed it up with an explanation: “Yes they can control the weather.”
Greene was using they as a choose-your-own-adventure word, allowing her followers to replace the pronoun with their own despised group: the federal government, perhaps, or liberal elites, or Democrats. All of the above? Whoever they are, Greene appeared to be saying, they sent a hurricane roaring toward Trump country.
The claim may be laughable, but Greene wasn’t trying to be funny. Donald Trump and his allies, including Greene, are working hard to politicize the weather—to harness Helene and soon-to-make-landfall Milton as a kind of October surprise against the Democrats before next month’s election. Such false claims have real-world implications, not least impeding recovery efforts. But they also offer a foretaste of the grievance-fueled disinformation mayhem that we’ll see on and after Election Day. In what will almost certainly be another nail-biter of an election—decided once again by tens of thousands of votes in a few states—conspiracy-mongering about the validity of the results could lead to very real political unrest.
Over the next few weeks, “we’re going to see this disinformation get worse,” Graham Brookie, a disinformation expert at the Atlantic Council, an international-affairs think tank, told me. “We’re going to be coming back to this again and again and again.”
While Greene was making her strange foray into cloud-seeding and weather modification last week, Trump was spreading his own set of more terrestrial lies. At a rally in Georgia, the GOP nominee claimed that the state’s governor, Brian Kemp, couldn’t reach Joe Biden, even though Kemp had spoken with the president about relief efforts the day before. On Truth Social, Trump falsely alleged that government officials in hurricane-battered North Carolina were “going out of their way to not help people in Republican areas.” Later, Trump repeatedly accused Vice President Kamala Harris of spending FEMA money on “illegal migrants.” (She didn’t; FEMA administers a program that helps state and local governments house migrants, but those resources are separate from disaster-relief funds.) Over the weekend, Trump argued that Americans who lost their homes in Helene were receiving only $750 from FEMA—in fact, that amount is just emergency aid for essentials; survivors can apply for up to $42,500 in additional assistance.
Online, rumors swirled. Right-wing activists shared texts from unnamed acquaintances in unidentified places complaining about the government response. Elon Musk, a recent convert to the Church of Trump, told his 200 million followers on X that FEMA had been “ferrying illegals” into the country instead of “saving American lives.” Later, when he accused the Federal Aviation Administration of blocking aid to parts of North Carolina, Musk was talked down by Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, who apparently assured him in a phone call that this was not happening.
The practical effect of these falsehoods is that local officials have to spend precious time and energy combatting misinformation, rather than recovery efforts. FEMA’s response has, inevitably, aroused frustrations about delays and bureaucracy, but the intensity of this hurricane season is creating unprecedented challenges. And the propagation of lies could demoralize people in affected areas, “reducing the likelihood that survivors will come to FEMA” for help, one agency official said earlier this week. Government officials have spent the past week engaged in the crisis-comms operation of a lifetime: FEMA has a dedicated webpage for debunking rumors being spread by the leader of the Republican Party and his allies; the state of North Carolina does, too. And at least one GOP member of Congress has broken ranks to send out a press release clarifying that, in fact, “Hurricane Helene was NOT geoengineered by the government to seize and access lithium deposits in Chimney Rock.”
The problem is that their efforts aren’t making much of an impact, Nina Jankowicz, the author of How to Lose the Information War, told me. “That is in part because we have seen the complete kind of buy-in from the Republican Party establishment into these falsehoods.” Hurricane Milton, currently a Category 4 storm, will hit Florida’s west coast tonight, and already the same Helene-style conspiracy theories have begun to circulate. “WEATHER MODIFICATION WEAPONIZED AGAINST POLITICAL OPPONENTS,” one Trump-aligned account with 155,000 followers wrote on X: “It’s being done to protect pedophiles and child traffickers from prosecution and so much more.” A self-described “decentralized tech maverick” is telling Floridians that FEMA won’t let them return to their homes if they evacuate. (The post, which received 1.1 million views, is a lie.)
[Read: Milton is the hurricane that scientists were dreading]
Rumor and distortion typically abound during and after storms, mass shootings, and other “crisis-information environments,” as the academic parlance labels them. And elections, especially ones with narrow margins, have very similar dynamics, Brookie, from the Atlantic Council, told me. “There’s a lot of new information, high levels of engagement, and a lot of really sustained focus on every single update.”
The 2024 election may not be called on November 5 and could easily remain unresolved for a few days afterward. In that fuzzy interregnum, a very familiar series of events could unfold. Just replace Trump’s hurricane-related conspiracy theories with some wild allegation about Sharpies at polling sites or secret bins full of uncounted ballots. Instead of being blamed for hogging FEMA resources, undocumented immigrants will be accused of voting en masse. It’s easy to imagine, because we already saw it play out in 2020: the suitcases of ballots and a burst pipe, the tainted Dominion voting machines, the hordes of zombie voters. The MAGA loyalists in Congress and the pro-Trump media ecosystem will amplify these claims. Musk, never one to stay calm on the sidelines, will leap into the fray with his proprietary algorithm-boosted commentary.
Local election officials will try to clear things up, but it could be too late. Millions of Americans across the country, primed to distrust government and institutions, will be sure that something sinister has taken place.
The hurricanes’ aftermath will already have created new opportunities for conspiracy-mongers, even before the election. After Helene, the North Carolina Elections Board passed emergency measures that will allow some voters to request and receive absentee ballots up until the day before the election. Depending on the damage caused by Milton, Florida may make some of its own election changes. “That will clearly come under attack,” Elaine Kamarck, a co-author of Lies That Kill: A Citizen’s Guide to Disinformation, told me. As we saw with procedural changes made to accommodate voters during the coronavirus pandemic, “change in the voting process can always be used to make people paranoid.”
Right now, Americans in the Southeast are preparing to weather a very dangerous storm. This time next month, all of us will be facing a storm of a different kind.
theatlantic.com