The White House's rapid response team thanked President Trump for the historically quiet Atlantic hurricane season, and the establishment press immediately framed a cheeky social media post as cultish worship.
The real story isn't whether Trump controls the weather — nobody serious claims that — it's that the same media apparatus that spent eight years treating Barack Obama as a secular messiah and four years running cover for Joe Biden's cognitive collapse now clutches its pearls over an obvious troll post.
Meteorologist Chris Martz posted Saturday that the Atlantic had reached September 12 without a single hurricane — the first time that's happened in the satellite era, dating to 1966, and the first time since at least 1941. Accumulated cyclone energy sat at just 4.4, roughly 93 percent below the 1991-2020 average for this point in the season, according to the Atlanta Black Star.
The pro-Trump account Rapid Response 47 shared Martz's post with a simple addition: "Thank you, President Trump!"
Atlanta Black Star framed this as the White House taking "Trump worship to an insane new level," as though a social media team's obvious joke amounted to a genuine claim of divine intervention. The outlet rounded up the usual online mockery — "even hurricanes want nothing to do with him," "the incompetence knows no bounds," "they really are nuts" — as though Twitter snark constituted a news story.
The actual explanation for the quiet season is El Niño. NOAA has forecast below-normal hurricane activity for the Atlantic basin this year. A strong El Niño increases vertical wind shear over the Atlantic, making it harder for tropical storms to organize, according to PBS reporting cited by Atlanta Black Star. As University of Miami hurricane expert Brian McNoldy put it, developing storms get "their heads cut off before they even have a chance."
Nobody in the White House communications shop claimed Trump literally stopped hurricanes through force of will. But Atlanta Black Star and the broader anti-Trump press ecosystem can't distinguish between social media ribbing and genuine sycophancy — or more likely, they don't want to.
The press spent years treating Obama's every utterance as poetry and Biden's every stumble as a nothingburger. When a Trump-aligned account fires off a tongue-in-cheek post, the same crowd suddenly rediscovers its commitment to literal truth. The cult isn't in the White House — it's in the newsrooms.
