As Karoline Leavitt rages at the media and Democrats for probing whether Trump policies made the Texas disaster worse, Kate Aronoff argues that this absolutely is the time for such hard questions.
The deaths of 27 girls at a Texas summer camp—victims of flooding exacerbated by neglected infrastructure and deregulation—expose a grim irony at the heart of Trump-era politics and Texas exceptionalism: the performative piety and family-values rhetoric of the Christian right are hollow when matched against the real-world consequences of its disdain for government competence.
Karoline Leavitt, the devoutly Christian Trump press secretary, lashed out at journalists and Democrats for raising the obvious: Did Trump-era rollbacks of FEMA guidelines, environmental safeguards, and emergency preparedness policies contribute to the scale of this tragedy? In her outrage, she demanded national mourning—yet that very notion of shared grief and responsibility is antithetical to the MAGA worldview, which vilifies blue states, immigrants, coastal elites, and anyone outside the tent of cultural and ideological conformity.
That those who died were girls attending a Christian camp only sharpens the contradiction. These weren’t the secular urbanites so often caricatured by the right. They were the daughters of exactly the kind of faith-driven, traditional families the movement claims to protect. But the same movement systematically dismantled the very institutions—regulatory, infrastructural, and civic—that could have saved them.
This is what happens when faith becomes an aesthetic, not a commitment to justice. When religious identity is used not to bind a community together in mutual care, but as a cultural weapon to excuse abdication of duty. Texas’s deregulated grid, flood-prone development, and hands-off emergency planning are features, not bugs, of a governance model that lionizes rugged individualism while outsourcing the cost to the vulnerable.
The question isn't whether we should grieve. It's whether grief can coexist with accountability—and whether those invoking “family values” are willing to reckon with the systemic cruelty they helped build.
The deaths of 27 girls at a Texas summer camp—victims of flooding exacerbated by neglected infrastructure and deregulation—expose a grim irony at the heart of Trump-era politics and Texas exceptionalism: the performative piety and family-values rhetoric of the Christian right are hollow when matched against the real-world consequences of its disdain for government competence.
Karoline Leavitt, the devoutly Christian Trump press secretary, lashed out at journalists and Democrats for raising the obvious: Did Trump-era rollbacks of FEMA guidelines, environmental safeguards, and emergency preparedness policies contribute to the scale of this tragedy? In her outrage, she demanded national mourning—yet that very notion of shared grief and responsibility is antithetical to the MAGA worldview, which vilifies blue states, immigrants, coastal elites, and anyone outside the tent of cultural and ideological conformity.
That those who died were girls attending a Christian camp only sharpens the contradiction. These weren’t the secular urbanites so often caricatured by the right. They were the daughters of exactly the kind of faith-driven, traditional families the movement claims to protect. But the same movement systematically dismantled the very institutions—regulatory, infrastructural, and civic—that could have saved them.
This is what happens when faith becomes an aesthetic, not a commitment to justice. When religious identity is used not to bind a community together in mutual care, but as a cultural weapon to excuse abdication of duty. Texas’s deregulated grid, flood-prone development, and hands-off emergency planning are features, not bugs, of a governance model that lionizes rugged individualism while outsourcing the cost to the vulnerable.
The question isn't whether we should grieve. It's whether grief can coexist with accountability—and whether those invoking “family values” are willing to reckon with the systemic cruelty they helped build.