We are past the peak of the Hurricane season and the great news is that no hurricanes have yet formed in the Atlantic Ocean. This should be a cause of massive relief yet for poor David A. Graham of The Atlantic, this also seems to be a source of frustration. Why? Because Donald Trump has not had to face a hurricane disaster going into the midterm elections. Graham's bizarre attitude can be see in his Tuesday article in which he almost seems to plead for a hurricane so as to harm Trump, "How Long Can the U.S. Escape an Atlantic Hurricane?"
Graham's not very well hidden frustration over a lack of hurricanes is encapsulated in the following:
...This is great news for the Americans who are otherwise often in hurricanes’ paths, and who have been slammed by a series of storms in the past decade—including 2024’s Hurricane Helene, the deadliest to hit the mainland United States since Hurricane Katrina, in 2005. It is also great news for Trump, who must be one of the luckiest people in history. Hurricanes can help or, more often, badly hurt a president. George W. Bush’s reputation never recovered from Katrina, whereas Barack Obama’s steady hand during Hurricane Sandy seemed to bolster his reelection campaign.
Before his angst over Trump's luck boiled over, Graham noted the rarity of such a lack of hurricanes this year:
September 10 is typically the peak of Atlantic Ocean hurricane season. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration expected a relatively restrained year, but as the meteorologist and hurricane specialist Michael Lowry writes, the season “has never gone beyond September 11th in the reliable records (since at least 1950) without a hurricane” in the Atlantic Ocean—until this year. There aren’t even any strong prospects forming.
This good news immediately caused poor Graham to immediately focus in on his obsession... Trump.
Amid spreading violence in the Middle East, warnings of an AI apocalypse, and high fuel prices, it’s a rare piece of good news, and Trump wants credit. Over the weekend, the White House flagged the news, commenting, “Thank you, President Trump!” This is absurd, though maybe no one should be surprised that a man who believed that marking a map with Sharpie can change a hurricane’s path would take credit for a low-key storm season. (He also reportedly once suggested attacking storms with nuclear weapons, so perhaps, as the journalist Catherine Rampell jokes, this is deterrence in action.)
Graham concludes on a weird note of political hope that maybe, possibly, a hurricane could still emerge this year (preferably before election day) to cause political damage to Trump:
Alas, the calm before the storms won’t last indefinitely. Experts who spoke with The New York Times said that it would be premature to assume that no major Atlantic hurricanes will form this year. If the president’s political luck continues, then perhaps the East Coast won’t see a really bad storm until after the midterm elections, or maybe even next year.
