The November election will be even worse

Last week, Republican Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia posted a map on X showing how Hurricane Helene overlapped with majority Republican areas in the South. She followed with a statement: “Yes, they can control the weather.”

Greene used She as a “choose your own adventure” phrase that allows its adherents to replace the pronoun with their own despised group: the federal government, perhaps, or liberal elites, or Democrats. All of the above? Whoever She Greene seemed to say they sent a hurricane toward Trump country.

The claim may be ridiculous, but Greene wasn't trying to be funny. Donald Trump and his allies, including Greene, are working hard to politicize the weather – to use Helene and the soon-to-come Milton as a sort of October surprise against the Democrats ahead of next month's election. Such false claims have real-world implications, not least hindering recovery efforts. But they also offer a foretaste of the grievance-fueled disinformation chaos we will see on and after Election Day. In an election that will almost certainly again be decided by tens of thousands of votes in some states, conspiracy theories about the validity of the results could lead to very real political unrest.

In the next few weeks, “we’re going to see this disinformation getting worse,” Graham Brookie, a disinformation expert at the Atlantic Council, an international affairs think tank, told me. “We will come back to this again and again.”

While Greene was making her strange foray into cloud formation and weather modification last week, Trump was spreading his own, more earthly lies. At a rally in Georgia, the Republican candidate claimed that the state's governor, Brian Kemp, could not reach Joe Biden, even though Kemp had spoken to the president about relief efforts the day before. On Truth Social, Trump falsely claimed that government officials in hurricane-stricken North Carolina were “doing everything possible not to help people in Republican areas.” Trump later repeatedly accused Vice President Kamala Harris of spending FEMA funds on “illegal migrants.” (It didn't; FEMA administers a program that helps state and local governments house migrants, but those resources are separate from disaster relief funds.) Over the weekend, Trump argued that Americans who had lost their homes in Helene , only $750 was received by FEMA – in fact, this amount is just emergency aid for essentials; Survivors can apply for up to $42,500 in additional support.

Rumors circulated online. Right-wing activists shared texts from unnamed acquaintances in undisclosed locations complaining about the government's response. Elon Musk, a recent convert to the Church of Trump, told his 200 million followers on X that FEMA was “bringing illegals into the country” instead of “saving American lives.” When he later accused the Federal Aviation Administration of blocking aid deliveries to parts of North Carolina, Musk was lambasted by Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, who apparently assured him in a phone call that this was not the case.

The practical impact of these falsehoods is that local officials must invest valuable time and energy combating misinformation rather than seeking redress. FEMA's response has inevitably brought frustration over delays and bureaucracy, but the intensity of this hurricane season presents unprecedented challenges. And spreading lies could demoralize people in affected areas and “reduce the likelihood that survivors will seek help from FEMA,” an agency official said earlier this week. Government officials have spent the past week on the crisis communications operation of a lifetime: FEMA has its own website debunking rumors spread by the Republican Party leader and his allies; The state of North Carolina does this too. And at least one Republican member of Congress has broken ranks and sent out a press release clarifying that “Hurricane Helene was NOT geoengineered by the government to seize and access lithium deposits at Chimney Rock.”

The problem is that their efforts don't have much impact, says Nina Jankowicz, the author of How to Lose the Information Wartold me. “That's partly because we've seen the Republican Party establishment fully support these falsehoods.” Hurricane Milton, currently a Category 4 storm, is set to hit the west coast of Florida tonight, and the same Helene-style conspiracy theories are already circulating. “WEATHER MODIFICATION IS A WEAPON AGAINST POLITICAL OPPONENTS,” wrote a Trump-affiliated account with 155,000 followers on Florida residents that FEMA would not allow them to return to their homes in the event of an evacuation. (The post, which received 1.1 million views, is a lie.)

Read: Milton is the hurricane scientists feared

Rumors and distortions typically occur during and after storms, mass shootings, and other “crisis information environments,” as they are known in academic parlance. And elections, particularly those with narrow margins, have very similar dynamics, the Atlantic Council's Brookie told me. “There is a lot of new information, a high level of engagement and a really sustained focus on every single update.”

The 2024 election may not be called on November 5th and could easily remain unresolved for several days after that. A very familiar series of events could be unfolding in this blurry interregnum. Just replace Trump's hurricane conspiracy theories with wild claims about Sharpies at polling places or secret trash cans full of uncounted ballots. Instead of being blamed for wasting FEMA resources, undocumented immigrants will be blamed for voting en masse. It's easy to imagine, because we've already seen it in 2020: the suitcases full of ballots and a burst pipe, the corrupted Dominion voting machines, the hordes of zombie voters. The MAGA loyalists in Congress and the pro-Trump media ecosystem will amplify these claims. Musk, never one to stay quiet on the sidelines, will jump into the fray with his proprietary, algorithmically-backed commentary.

Local election officials will try to clear things up, but it may be too late. Millions of Americans across the country, primed to distrust government and institutions, will be certain that something sinister has happened.

The aftermath of the hurricanes will have opened up new opportunities for conspiracy theorists even before the election. After Helene, the North Carolina Elections Board passed emergency measures allowing some voters to request and receive mail-in ballots up to the day before the election. Depending on the damage caused by Milton, Florida could make some of its own election changes. “This is clearly going to be attacked,” said Elaine Kamarck, co-author of Lies That Kill: A Citizen's Guide to Disinformationtold me. As we've seen with the procedural changes made during the coronavirus pandemic to accommodate voters, “changes in the voting process can always be used to make people paranoid.”

Currently, Americans in the Southeast are preparing to weather a very dangerous storm. This time next month we will all be facing a different kind of storm.