Helene Makes Clear the Need for America First

Although the Trump campaign hasn’t used the “America First” tagline as much as it used to, it may be time to dust it off again. As the journalist Lee Smith tweeted this week, “What distinguishes Trump from everyone else who has governed this country the last several decades is that he recognizes the primary job of the US President is to protect Americans.” That Smith is correct has been proven again this week in the revelations about what American governmental priorities are. Americans seem pretty far down the list.

The news that the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) is short on resources to offer the residents of Florida, Georgia, North and South Carolina, and Tennessee—all affected by Hurricane Helene—but that our government has doled out nearly $1 billion to settle illegal immigrants in the last year through the agency was a bit shocking. Though defenders of FEMA have been arguing that the funds come from different governmental buckets, the question is why are illegal immigrants getting money from these buckets at all when our own citizens have needs?

This isn’t just a question for our federal government but also states run by Democrats. Earlier this year, residents of the state of Maine, where there is a housing shortage, were informed that a new 60-apartment complex in the town of Brunswick would be housing immigrants who would be able to live there for free for two years due to government money. That Mainers themselves were having a hard time is an understatement. The Maine Wire reported in June, “According to MaineHousing’s ‘Affordability Index,’ which measures the ratio between median home price and median income required to buy a home at that price, 79.1 percent of Maine families were unable to afford a home in 2023.”

And yet Brunswick, part of Cumberland Country, which received over $6 million from the Shelter and Services program that FEMA administered to settle immigrants, is using a combination of private and public funds to allow immigrants to rent the apartments for free for two years. As Savanah Hernandez of The Post-Millennial reported this week, ordinary people can rent in the Brunswick Landing apartment complex for an average of $1800 per month for one-bedroom apartments and $2300 per month for two-bedroom units, even as immigrants are living in these “luxury apartments” in a building locals are calling the “Taj Mahal” without paying rent, water, or electricity bills.  

This resettling of immigrants on the public dime in the middle of a housing crisis is bad enough, but why is our government also boasting about help given to people in other countries? At the same time the Biden-Harris Administration was announcing what can only be seen as a paltry sum of $2 million dollars for South Carolina, Secretary of State Antony Blinken was tweeting about what our government is doing for the people of Lebanon. The dollar figure was considerably larger: “The U.S. is at the forefront of humanitarian response to the growing crisis in Lebanon, announcing nearly $157 million in assistance today. We are committed to supporting those in need and delivering essential aid to displaced civilians, refugees and the communities hosting them.”

Kamala Harris herself tweeted about this, noting that “This additional support brings total U.S. assistance to Lebanon over the last year to over $385 million.” As Clint Brown, former director of the U. S. Senate Steering Committee, responded: “For $100 million you can provide 200,000 people with: 3 liters of water per day, for 1 week 3 meals per day, for 1 week 40,000 portable generators, and 100,000 medical kits. With $57 million, you could run 78 Black Hawk helicopters for Search and Rescue continuously for 1 week, including the cost of paying pilots and crew. For $157 million, combined with civilian efforts which your administration is impeding, you could have stabilized NC and saved countless American lives.”

That last bit is important. Countless people on the ground are claiming that FEMA and our government are not only not doing a great job managing this emergency; they are in fact impeding those Americans who are using their own resources to help people affected by this disaster. While our media are lining up to call such claims lies, the New York Post reported on Jordan Seidhom, a South Carolina volunteer firefighter and pilot who was threatened with arrest if he continued using his helicopter to rescue stranded Americans. Elon Musk reported that one of his SpaceX engineers was claiming that FEMA officials were “actively blocking shipments and seizing goods and services locally and locking them away to state they are their own.” Others are reporting, using sources inside FEMA, that politicians such as North Carolina Governor Roy Cooper are “impeding the deployment of military aid” to the affected areas.

Perhaps some of these stories will be explained or explained away as bureaucratic or political inefficiency. But a great deal of it sounds sinister. And the DNC-MSM reactions to the situation do not inspire confidence for those who believe that Appalachian lives should matter to our government. Many Americans have been shocked by the minimalist coverage of Helene, its massive damage, and the very odd and indifferent behavior of public officials—something unthinkable if Republicans had power in our government. Barack Obama and the media blasted George W. Bush for failing to get to New Orleans quick enough after Hurricane Katrina because it took him three days. Yet Joe Biden and Kamala Harris took longer than that—and longer than it took Donald Trump—to visit the site of Helene’s destruction. 

Even more worrisome, many Americans could also sense delight in the mainstream media that those hit by the hurricane were mostly deplorables. Politico’s framing of an article about challenges to voting this fall in affected areas clearly communicated a kind of glee about it: “Helene hit Trump strongholds in Georgia and North Carolina. It could swing the election.”

Gone is that concern about how “every vote ought to count” that animates Democrats when anything stands in their way—including requirements for proper identification for voters. Gone are the slogans about “country over party” that animate so many Democrats when they get some Republican or former Republican such as Liz Cheney to endorse their candidates. No, when it gets down to it, Democrats (and too many Republicans) are less concerned about America and Americans than they are about the citizens of other countries, their own political fortunes, and their own pocketbooks.

The late scholar Angelo Codevilla used to say that “America First” would have been unthinkable in the first century of U. S. history. After all, what on earth would be the point of American policy or statecraft other than the benefit of the United States of America? But, today, our government is more interested in and spends much more money on people who are illegally entering our country or who live in places such as Ukraine and Lebanon than on our own citizens.

The hard reality is that America is still (barely) a superpower, but it cannot take care of all the world’s problems. Nor ought it. Parents who take care of other people’s children while having no money or energy left for their own are not charitable but negligent. So, too, for governments that take care of other nation’s problems first and have little left for their own. “America First” is still the only sane way to approach policy here in America. Though some voters don’t like Donald Trump, it is incumbent on them to realize what Lee Smith realized. Trump understands the primary task of American politicians to protect, to govern, and to seek the welfare of America and Americans first. Anything else is hubris at best and negligence at worst. Both are extraordinarily dangerous.

David P. Deavel teaches at the University of St. Thomas in Houston, Texas. A past Lincoln Fellow at the Claremont Institute, he is a Senior Contributor at The Imaginative Conservative. Follow him on X @davidpdeavel.