F**king Mondays: Horrific Texas Floods, Musk Screws Trump, and Flake's Ominous Warning

The only column you need to read to start your week off.

Camp Mystic, Texas. An all-girls summer camp destroyed by flash floods. Image via YouTube.

Welcome to another edition of “F**king Mondays!” In the roundup today:

Texas floods: a preventable disaster?

Catastrophic flash floods struck Central Texas over the weekend after torrential rains dumped more than 10 inches in a few hours. The latest reporting indicates the flooding tragically killed at least 80 people, including 27 children and camp counselors at a summer camp. The floods also swept away homes, cars, and bridges, causing hundreds of millions of dollars in damage.

Although the National Weather Service issued warnings hours in advance, local officials said forecasts underestimated the storm’s intensity. The tragedy has sparked a political firestorm over whether staffing and funding cuts to the National Weather Service under the Trump administration contributed to the failure to adequately warn the public. Some argue the cuts weakened forecasting capacity, while the Trump administration and others at the NWS insists the system functioned properly despite the cuts.

The investigative reporting on this is still early and there is no definitive analysis (NBC has a good overview here).

But what we do know is that global warming is making catastrophic weather events like the one in Texas more frequent — and more severe. And as a consequence, we also know that funding weather monitoring is going to be more important than ever.

While I don’t want to “politicize” the tragedy, it is, for lack of a better term, fucking bonkers to slash funding for NOAA (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration) and the NWS (National Weather Service).

If we know these disasters are coming — and we do — then any remotely sane administration would be increasing budgets for the agencies that help us prepare. Instead, the Trump administration proposed a 27% cut to NOAA’s budget for 2026 that would permanently shut down arms like the National Severe Storms Laboratory.

The drastic cuts are part of a broader ideological war on science and environmentalism. Because the Trump administration does not believe global warming is a serious threat to the planet, it can cut America’s weather monitoring services and offer “prayers” in the wake of natural disasters. Just as Republicans refuse to assign blame for mass shootings on the almost total lack of gun control in America, they won’t concede global warming has anything to do with increasingly severe weather.

It may turn out that everything worked perfectly for the Texas flooding disaster, and it really couldn’t have been avoided. But there will be more floods and more natural disasters that we might be able to detect earlier if we invest in the agencies that monitor them. This administration won’t do that. And because of that choice, more Americans are going to die.

Is Elon Musk going to end the GOP?

Not quite, but he is seriously screwing them.

True to his word, the drug-addled billionaire has officially launched a new political party in America — imaginatively named the ‘America Party’. Musk’s new project is focused almost entirely on eliminating the debt, so outwardly it seems doomed to failure. The national debt is to most Americans a meaningless concept. In theory they want it reduced, but their immediate concerns like “can I afford groceries” and “is my healthcare bill going to bankrupt my family” tend to take priority.

The national debt is something Republicans love to weaponize when it’s time to slash social programs, only to immediately forget about it when ramming through massive tax cuts for the ultra-wealthy (see: Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill”). Still, there’s a small faction of conservatives who actually believe the debt is the gravest threat to humanity and vote accordingly. As Rachel Bitecofer writes:

The Republican coalition today is roughly 80% MAGA populism and 20% traditional fiscal conservatism. The Trump takeover was so complete that the Tea Party, which once pretended to care about debt, has been fully subsumed into MAGA’s cult-of-personality grievance politics.

But that last 15%-20% is still out there. They’re people like Thomas Massie, who actually voted against the “Big Ugly Bill” – the Trump-backed tax cut and deficit-exploding spending spree. They’re the ideologues who believe deficits matter, even if their party doesn’t anymore. They’re old school libertarians, Ron Paul acolytes, and Koch-bred Club for Growth types.

In other words, a tiny sliver of the current GOP coalition.

While it might be a tiny sliver, as Bitecofer notes, “even a tiny fracture matters in close elections”.

Musk won’t peel off any Democrats — his track record and online antics have made sure of that — but he will siphon off some hardcore conservatives, libertarians, and anti-MAGA cranks. With bottomless funding, his candidates don’t have to come close to winning to take down Republicans. They just need to take a few thousand — or even a few hundred — votes in the right places to tip the balance.

If Musk keeps backing the America Party through 2028, he could end up handing the presidency to a Democrat — assuming Trump hasn’t declared martial law and named himself president-for-life by then.

Musk may not have switched back to being a Democrat, but at this rate, he might as well have.

Even Republicans are now warning of dictatorship

Jeff Flake, the former Republican Senator from Arizona, has a penned a deeply alarming piece in the New York Times in the wake of Republican Senator Thom Tillis surprise retirement announcement over the weekend. Flake warns that Trump’s takeover of the GOP is so complete that any “deviation from his dictates is treated as apostasy”, and that his party is “no longer about ideas or governing philosophies,” but “about personal allegiance to a single man, whose positions can shift by the day.”

According to Flake, the Senate also no longer functions as “the world’s greatest deliberative body”. Instead, it “amplifies the loudest voices and calcifies the most rigid loyalties.” He continues:

Extreme partisanship has infected both parties, but it plays out differently. Among Democrats, it tends to be issue-driven — focused on ambitious policy goals, however unrealistic or out of step they may sometimes be. Among Republicans, it’s become personality-driven, centered almost entirely on staying in lock step with the president. That’s an even more dangerous trajectory, because it divorces political allegiance from any stable set of principles. When a party’s North Star is an individual, the direction of policy and the integrity of governance itself suffer.

I admire Senator Tillis for choosing not to betray his convictions just to secure another term. But his departure is a loss for the nation, the Senate and the Republican Party — indeed, for conservatism — which desperately need more voices willing to stand on principle rather than bend to one man’s will.

In other words, the GOP is no longer a political party in any meaningful sense of the word. It’s a vessel — a rubber stamp for Trump’s whims, complicit in the rapid dissolution of America’s democratic norms.

Flake has always been a vocal opponent of Donald Trump, but his recent warning is far more dramatic. If no Republican is willing to stand up to Trump, what will happen when he inevitably tries to subvert the democratic process in 2028? Trump failed in his attempts to overthrow the 2020 election because members of his own party refused to go along with him. Now those Republicans are gone — purged, retired, or replaced by loyalists. The party has been hollowed out, leaving no institutional resistance, no internal guardrails, and no one with the spine to say no.

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