Hurricane Harvey will be Donald Trump's first major natural disaster test

Last August, Donald Trump attacked Barack Obama for golfing on Martha's Vineyard after floods in Louisiana left 13 people dead. The then-Republican nominee flew to Baton Rouge to hand out toys to children who had lost their homes. "The president says he doesn't want to go," an outraged Trump told volunteers at a Baptist church.

"I heard he wants to stay under par while we are under water," said Tony Perkins, the president of the Family Research Council.

"He will never be under par," Trump replied.

When Obama went down a few days later, Trump declared on Fox News that it was "too late."

Now Trump faces his first major natural disaster as president. Will he go golfing this weekend as Hurricane Harvey pounds Texas?

If Harvey is not on your radar yet, it should be. From The Post's Joel Achenbach, Steven Mufson and Jason Samenow: "Texas is bracing for potentially catastrophic flooding and winds as Hurricane Harvey intensified Thursday and cruised toward a late Friday impact near Corpus Christi. The National Hurricane Center described Harvey's sudden strengthening as 'astounding.' The storm is expected to strike as a Category 3 hurricane - meaning with winds greater than 111 miles per hour - making it the most powerful storm to make landfall in the United States since Hurricane Wilma in 2005. Despite the increasingly alarming forecasts, officials in Corpus Christi as of Thursday evening had held off on ordering mandatory evacuations of the city. . . ."

The hurricane center projected that the hurricane will stall on the Texas coast for several days, which could dump historic quantities of rain, with some places seeing as much as 35 inches: "The storm is forecast to meander to the east, deluging Houston and possibly New Orleans next week."

"Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, R, declared a preemptive state of disaster in 30 counties, including Harris County, home to Houston, the fourth most-populated city in the country.

"ExxonMobil said at noon Thursday that it was already reducing production at its Hoover oil and gas platform in the Gulf of Mexico about 200 miles south of Houston and was evacuating personnel working offshore. Shell said it had evacuated about 200 offshore workers by helicopter and that it had shut in production and secured equipment at its deepwater Perdido oil and gas production hub. . . . More than 45 percent of U.S. petroleum refining capacity lies along the Gulf Coast . . . A Citigroup report to investors said more than 85 percent of Texas's refining capacity is located inside the highest precipitation zone for the storm."

Harvey's flood threat has sparked flashbacks to Tropical Storm Allison. A brief-but-haunting video released by NASA Thursday night shows the storm's powerful churn toward Central Texas: "The footage was captured just after 6 p.m. by cameras aboard the International Space Station, not long after the tropical cyclone - aided by warm water and favorable winds - regenerated over the Gulf of Mexico," per The Post's Andrew deGrandpre.

Storms like this can define presidencies. George W. Bush's presidency never recovered after Hurricane Katrina 12 summers ago. George H.W. Bush's 1992 reelection hopes were hurt by his botched response to Hurricane Andrew because it cemented the narrative that he was detached from domestic problems and unconcerned about acting swiftly to help regular people back home.

In contrast to his brother and father, everyone agrees that Jeb Bush did a fantastic job as governor of Florida at responding to hurricanes. "Nine hurricanes slammed into Florida during Bush's time in office, eight of them in a dizzying, 14-month span in 2004-05 - a record-breaking number that defined Bush as a steady executive in the face of disaster," the Miami Herald reported in a story that published two years ago Thursday.

The retrospective came as Jeb! sought to showcase his proven competence at disaster management as an asset on the campaign trail. A poll had just come out showing Trump overtaking Bush in his home state of Florida, so the campaign scheduled a town hall in Pensacola to remind voters of how well he'd managed the hurricanes.

It turned out Republican primary voters didn't care. A plurality wanted an outsider who would blow up Washington, not a steady hand. The result was that the United States wound up with its first president ever who has no prior governing or military experience. Now a novice is captaining the ship of state as a potential disaster approaches. Will he rise to the moment?

Thursday afternoon, Trump tweeted a video clip of him visiting FEMA headquarters for a briefing on hurricanes. That trip took place three weeks ago - on Aug. 4.

When will Trump go to Texas? The Obama White House bristled at Trump's attacks last year, saying the president was not just going to fly down to Baton Rouge for a photo op. It's a tricky balancing act. Bill Clinton criticized Bush 41 for going to Florida too soon after Hurricane Andrew during the 1992 campaign because he said it distracted emergency responders and tied up police who should have been helping people.

The danger of looking aloof is real. Bush 43 cut short a month-long vacation at his ranch in Crawford, Texas, by two days so that he could return to Washington to manage the response to Katrina. On the way back, Air Force One took a detour so the president could glimpse the wreckage. Photographers were invited into Bush's cabin so they could document him looking down on Louisiana from the window of his plane. Looking back, Bush has described that as "a huge mistake" that made him appear "aloof." "That photo of me hovering over the damage suggested I was detached from the suffering on the ground," he wrote in "Decision Points," his memoir. "That was not how I felt. But once that impression was formed, I couldn't change it."

Beware the split-screen effect: Obama's numbers took a big hit after the Deepwater Horizon oil rig exploded in the Gulf. One reason it was so bad was that there was a live feed of oil gushing into the ocean while experts struggled to plug the well. Trump could look bad, for example, if cable news juxtaposes footage of a brash and divisive speech against images of devastation in Texas. Can the president stay on message and appear focused on the task at hand in the face of human suffering?

"As a political matter, a botched hurricane response in the Gulf Coast . . . would see Trump criticized - not by blue-state leaders he can mock or ignore - but by key members of his own coalition," Ron Klain, a senior White House aide to Obama and Bill Clinton, noted in a potentially prescient Aug. 6 column.

Major damage will also draw public attention to severe budget cuts Trump has proposed. GOP operative John Weaver, a top strategist to John Kasich and John McCain before that, noted Thursday, tweeting:

"As we prepare for #Harvey and significant danger/damage, know that Trump wants to cut FEMA to help pay for his unneeded/unwanted wall."

Trump wants to cut the National Weather Service's budget by 6 percent and its parent agency, the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), by 16 percent. "Trump also proposed huge subcuts for programs that engage in computer modeling of storms, as well as observation of storms and dissemination of data," Newsweek's Matthew Cooper reports. "Already, the U.S. is behind Europe in its forecast accuracy, and further cuts to research would likely leave the country farther behind in what's been called 'climate intelligence.' The National Weather Service's main forecasting model, the Global Forecasting System, has seen a major drop-off in accuracy. The White House's budget proposal would only make it worse. It seeks to cut 26 percent from NOAA's Office of Oceanic and Atmospheric Research, which supports data collection, climate and science, as well as research into more accurate weather forecasting models. The budget blueprint also would cut $513 million from NOAA's satellite division . . . a 22 percent reduction."

Before his retirement at the end of June, the retiring chief of a team of U.S. hurricane specialists at the National Hurricane Center warned that Trump's budget cuts could have dire consequences. "It's hanging on really by a thread in terms of funding," James Franklin told the Associated Press before stepping down after 35 years at NOAA.

"What's more, it's terrifying to think that Trump will be handling this crisis while he continues to deny the existence of human-caused climate change, which makes heavy rainfall events like this one more likely," writes the New Republic's Emily Atkin. "He recently rolled back flood standards that required new federal infrastructure be built with sea-level-rise in mind."

Some good news: Trump's FEMA director, Brock Long, is well regarded by professionals. "He was sworn in just two months ago," Bloomberg's Chris Flavelle reports in a profile that just posted. "Long's appointment was welcomed by experts on extreme weather, who praised him as neither overtly ideological nor hostile to the mission of the agency he was chosen to lead. Before being appointed to the top job, he was director of Alabama's Emergency Management Agency from 2008 to 2011, as well as a regional hurricane program manager for FEMA."

But Hurricane Harvey could also spotlight still-unfilled positions in the Trump administration. Trump still had not nominated an administrator to lead NOAA, for example, even though Obama named someone before he was even inaugurated.

There is also no replacement yet for John Kelly at the Department of Homeland Security, which includes FEMA. He resigned as secretary to become White House chief of staff. At Thursday's briefing, press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said the president has confidence in acting DHS Secretary Elaine Duke. "I think that we are in great shape having General Kelly sitting next to the president throughout this process," she said, adding that there is "probably no better chief of staff for the president during the hurricane season." "The president has been briefed and will continue to be updated as the storm progresses," Huckabee Sanders said. "Certainly (it is) something he's very aware of, and we'll keep a very watchful eye on, and (he) stands ready to provide resources if needed."

Bigger picture: Does Houston have a problem? "Hurricane Ike, a storm that struck the Texas Gulf Coast in 2008, was the kind of event that's often described as a wake-up call. Hurricane Harvey . . . could show whether the region actually woke up," The Atlantic's David Graham writes. "Depending on where it hits, and with what force, the storm could kill dozens, cause heavy flooding, and disrupt the national economy for months to come. The threat of a major storm striking the area, and especially the Houston Ship Channel, the nation's second-largest port by tonnage, has long been a nightmare scenario for disaster experts, especially after Ike killed more than 100 people in the United States and inflicted $25 billion in losses. But that storm didn't hit the ship channel head on. Rice University's Severe Storm Prediction, Education, and Evacuation from Disasters (SSPEED) Center predicts a direct hit would 'easily' cause more than $100 billion in damages. Yet action to prepare for such a storm has been slow."

ProPublica and Texas Tribune partnered on a March 2016 project called "Hell and High Water" about "why Texas isn't ready" for a storm like Harvey. (https://projects.propublica.org/houston/)

Marshall Shepherd, who directs the Atmospheric Sciences Program at the University of Georgia, lays out four dangers of Hurricane Harvey that may not be obvious to the public: Hurricane Amnesia, The Post-Landfall Flood Threat, Power Loss, and a major economic disruption.

Washington Post