Donald Trump has been accused of many outlandish things, but killing children with flash floods has to be among the worst.

The first reflex of his critics was to blame him for the appalling tragedy in Central Texas, where a flood on July 4 killed more than 80 people, including two dozen children at a Christian summer camp.

This is one of the deadliest floods in the United States in the last 100 years, and the toll among kids is a particular gut-punch. It’s natural that observers will ask how it could have happened, but the fact-free, malicious attacks constitute one of the more poisonously stupid episodes of the Trump years — and that’s saying a lot.

The theory here is that Elon Musk’s chain-saw cuts to the National Weather Service gutted the agency with catastrophic consequences. See, Trump’s adversaries say, we told you DOGE would get people killed.

There were indeed staff reductions at the National Weather Service, totaling about 10%. The idea, though, that this suddenly rendered the agency inoperable is absurd. (Trump’s budget proposes a very slight increase in funding for the NWS, by the way). In keeping with standard practice, the weather service in Texas surged extra staff as the storm gathered.

There is no doubt that the agency did its job. On Sunday, it noted the potential for heavy rainfall during the coming week. A few days later, it was talking of the possibility of flooding on Thursday, July 3. Then, on Thursday morning, it issued a flash hazard outlook, followed in the afternoon by a flood watch.

As Thursday evening progressed, its communications grew steadily more alarming.

At 1:14 a.m. on Friday the 4th, it used a warning of “life-threatening flash flooding of creeks and streams, urban areas, highways, streets and underpasses.” It said that the “flash flooding is ongoing or expected to begin shortly.” The warning triggered wireless emergency alerts.

At 4 a.m., it declared a flash flood emergency.

The private prediction service AccuWeather also issued warnings. It has said that these notices should have provided officials “ample time” for evacuations.

What happened? It’s almost unfathomable how quickly the waters of the Guadalupe River rose, from 1 foot to 36 feet, according to one gauge, creating from seemingly out of nowhere a cataclysm of biblical proportions (“And, behold, I, even I, do bring a flood of waters upon the earth, to destroy all flesh, wherein is the breath of life”). The event happened in the middle of the night, when awareness is going to be limited. And people naturally develop warning fatigue, assuming that the worst won’t actually happen or won’t affect them.

Texas and local communities would probably be well-served to adopt a tornado-type siren system to warn of imminent floods.

Another line of criticism of the Trump administration is that it doesn’t care about climate change, and such catastrophic floods — supposedly growing worse with more extreme rain events — are the inevitable result of global warming.

Yet, flooding is nothing new in this part of Texas known as “flash flood alley.” Weather maven Chris Martz points out that there were major floods of the Guadalupe River in 1838, 1869, 1906, 1921, 1932, 1936, 1952, 1978, 1987 and 1998.

It was the remnant of Tropical Storm Barry that fueled the epochal rain, dumping 20 inches in spots. According to the National Weather Service’s prediction center, it was the 20th time that a tropical cyclone or remnant led to 15 inches or more of rain in the interior of the state since 1913.

Martz notes that there has been no trend in the annual maximum one-day precipitation in Texas since 1895, and river floods have decreased in frequency in Texas Hill Country since 1965.

But the narratives are irresistible for anti-Trump partisans and their fellow travelers in the media.

Donald Trump is responsible for many things. The weather is not one of them.

© 2025 by King Features Syndicate