How Trump’s Incompetence and Looming Global Catastrophes May Intersect

​

“Scientists warn of a potentially severe El Niño event this summer, exacerbated by global warming. The Trump administration’s actions, including layoffs at FEMA and dismantling of USAID, along with its pro-fossil fuel policies, threaten the US’s ability to respond to climate disasters and hinder global climate action.

​

The leadership team from hell on a hell of a planet.

April 9, 2026

President Donald Trump pumps his fist as he walks to board Marine One at Joint Base Andrews in Maryland on January 11, 2026.

(Andrew Cabellero-Reynolds / AFP via Getty Images)

This article originally appeared at TomDispatch.com. To stay on top of important articles like these, sign up to receive the latest updates from TomDispatch.com.

On March 13, buried in The New York Times’ coverage of the US/Israel-Iran conflict was a headline that would have been easy to miss amid the din of war coverage: “As El Niño Simmers, Scientists Warn of Weather Extremes Starting in Late Summer.” Many readers may not even have noticed it, but that article notedthat scientists at the Climate Prediction Center, a part of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, had raised their estimate for an El Niño event this summer from 60 percent to about 80 percent.

Admittedly, in this strange world of ours, that hardly seemed like an earth-shattering revelation. But if you had read the piece more closely, your alarm bells should instantly have gone off. Forecasters now predict that the coming El Niño—a warming of the Pacific Ocean that deeply affects global weather patterns—is likely to be as severe as the one in 2023–24, which triggered severe flooding and prolonged heatwaves around the world. As the article noted, however, average world temperatures are now actually higher than they were at the height of that previous El Niño, thanks to global warming, and so it’s likely that we will face even more intense heatwaves and flooding this time around.

Consider that news alarming enough. Unfortunately, the bad news didn’t end there. The Times article went on to report that, since early last year, the Trump administration has laid off thousands of Federal Emergency Management Agency workers, greatly diminishing the agency’s ability to respond to such impending weather disasters. And then there’s the dismal fact that Trump has overseen the dismantling of the US Agency for International Development, which once sent humanitarian aid to disaster-struck countries.

And, sadly enough, it only gets worse from there. After all, we know that the Trump administration is doing everything it can to boost the production of fossil fuels—the consumption of which is the main driver of global warming—even as it also works to impede global action to slow the warming process. On January 7, for example, the president announced that the United States would withdraw from the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, the bedrock treaty upon which most international efforts to rein in that onrushing nightmare are based.“