Trump Is Ignoring St Louis’s Devastating Tornado

One of the most destructive tornadoes in recent years tore a 23-mile path across urban St Louis on May 16, causing an estimated $1.6 billion in damages and killing five people. While it was not quite as powerful as the 2011 tornado that leveled much of Joplin, Mo., the St Louis twister is drawing comparisons.

But despite the scale of the devastation, President Trump has yet to declare the tornado a federal emergency — leaving those whose lives have been upended by the historic storm, many of whom are Black, without any support from the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

RELATED: Will Changes at FEMA Make Disaster Aid Worse?

Democratic Texas Rep. Jasmine Crockett, a St. Louis native, explained in an Instagram post that: FEMA isn’t showing up “not because people aren’t willing to show up,” but because the Trump Administration “fails to recognize what it is that they need to prioritize, which is the people.”

The tornado, an EF3 with wind speeds around 150 miles per hour, mostly cut through the northside of the city, including neighborhoods that many Black residents were segregated into starting in the early 1900s through a combination of redlining and other racist real estate tactics like racial covenants. Wells Goodfellow, a neighborhood just a few miles south of Ferguson, was particularly hard-hit; residents were nearly 95% Black in 2020, according to Census data.

Following the Joplin tornado — the deadliest tornado in the U.S. since 1950 — a federal emergency declaration was made by then-President Barack Obama just two days after the storm hit on May 22. Obama also visited Missouri to tour the destruction just a week after that twister touched down.

In August of 2005, when Hurricane Katrina was barreling toward Louisiana, President George W. Bush made the first in a series of disaster declarations in the days before the storm made landfall. While FEMA can be a damaging force in its own right following a disaster, as was certainly the case in New Orleans after Katrina, an emergency declaration started the flow of federal support even before the levees failed.

It’s now been over two weeks since the St. Louis tornado touched down, and there is still no formal federal response to the storm. FEMA investigators have surveyed the damage, but emergency declarations can only be made by the president, and Trump has yet to say anything about the storm.

On May 23, the president made an emergency declaration for a pair of smaller tornadoes that struck the Greater St. Louis area back in mid-March. Missouri Governor Mike Kehoe, a Republican, made a formal request on May 19 for a federal emergency declaration to the resident for the St. Louis tornado and storms in southeastern Missouri that struck on the same day, killing two additional people. Both of Missouri’s Senators, who are also both Republicans, have urged the president to make an emergency declaration, too.

Sen. Josh Hawley asked Secretary Kristi Noem, the head of the Department of Homeland Security (which FEMA is a part of), to push for federal aid for Missouri, and she said she would expedite the FEMA response once President Trump made a disaster declaration. But until that declaration is made, there can be no federal response to the storm.

Of course, both Trump and Noem have suggested getting rid of FEMA entirely, and the emergency-response agency has been cut significantly by the administration.

“FEMA is shifting from bloated, DC-centric dead weight to a lean, deployable disaster force that empowers state actors to provide relief for their citizens,” a FEMA spokesperson said in a statement on Monday.

The Administration’s hope is to eventually shift the responsibility for disaster response over to the states entirely, which is effectively what’s happening in Missouri now, and it’s not going well.

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