Frazier is an assistant professor at the Crump College of Law at St. Thomas University and a Tarbell fellow.
Before I left for the airport to attend a conference in Washington, D.C., I double checked with my wife that she was OK with me leaving while a hurricane was brewing in the Gulf of Mexico. We had been in Miami for a little more than a year at that point, and it doesn’t take long to become acutely attentive to storms when you live in Florida. Storms nowadays form faster, hit harder and stay longer.
Ignorance of the weather is not an option. It’s tiring.
I arrived in Washington and incessantly checked the weather. Each hour introduced a new wrinkle in the forecast. And, as a result, another text to my wife — asking how hurricane prep was going, pledging I’d make my way home and nudging her to cross her fingers for a little longer. I carried on in hopes that it would be another instance of a storm shifting direction — subjecting some other community to its wrath (a horrible thought that you just can’t think too long about).
The storm didn’t shift. My schedule had to change. Twelve hours after landing in D.C., I found myself again going through TSA, finding a quick meal and praying my flight would take off (and land) smoothly. I arrived home around 12:30 a.m. and slept on the couch to avoid waking up the dog (and, by extension, my wife). We woke up and continued the storm prep. Our friends and family called to check in. Our coworkers asked if we’d be on time to various meetings. The storm protocol carried on.
The storm shifted. Well, at least a little. Miami didn’t experience nearly as much devastation, flooding and harm as its neighbors to the north. We breathed an odd and awkward sigh of relief. What a terrible feeling. The two of us were exhausted. But home. Safe. Warm. Many couldn’t say the same.
It’s going to be hard to keep this up when more storms head our way. The local weatherman who cried “Category 5!” becomes a little less reputable after even one storm dives in a new direction. The email from the landlord encouraging you to stockpile supplies seems a little over the top. It’s all emotionally, physically and, in some cases, monetarily expensive. For all those reasons it’s not surprising why some people become numb to emergency warnings.
Disaster fatigue is a real thing. We need a cure.
Our interconnected, chaotic and turbulent world is going to continue to test us. Storms will keep coming. Political turmoil won’t just disappear. Economic swings will continue. Tranquility is officially a scarce commodity. Individually, we must remain vigilant and resist the temptation to hope that the latest storm, stock market drop or otherwise crisis isn’t going to take us out. Societally, we need to make it easier to transition from the status quo to prepped for the worst-case scenario.
The solution is raising our collective level of preparedness across every dimension. With respect to natural disasters, periods of smooth seas and clear skies should be used to spread emergency kits. Storms like Helene show that even so-called climate havens like Asheville, N.C., need to be ready for the worst.
When it comes to political stability, we ought to continue to explore ways to decrease the partisan temperature. This may include greater investment in local news outlets that can make sure folks have alternatives to social media for essential information.
And, in light of financial uncertainty, we should develop and encourage novel means to bolster the size of the average savings account. This may take the form of traditional tax incentives to reward wise financial decisions to more creative approaches like savings lotteries in which each dollar saved increases the odds of earning a jackpot of sorts.
Disasters aren’t going away. Our policies should reflect the reality that preparedness must become our new normal. It’s not fun. It won’t be easy. But it’s necessary.
image of U.S. President Donald Trump is displayed on a digital billboard in Times Square in New York on April 8, 2026.
Trump is stuck between two realities. Neither serves the American people
Normally, I worry that events may overtake a column. But not so with the Iran war.
I don’t worry about running afoul of a headline or Truth Social post from the president because what is said about the situation is no longer very relevant to the reality.
On April 8, Nick Catoggio, my Dispatch colleague, dubbed an earlier stoppage with Iran “Schrödinger’s ceasefire.” This was a reference to the famous thought experiment by the physicist Erwin Schrödinger, who was trying to explain the weirdness of “superpositionality” in quantum physics. A cat in a box is both dead and alive at the same time until you open the box. Schrödinger meant to illustrate the absurdity of the idea that particles aren’t any one thing, but a “cloud of probabilities.”
The Trump administration is stuck in a word cloud of probabilities of his own making. The war is over. The war is on. The war isn’t a war. We have a deal, but we don’t have a deal, but we’re about to have a deal. We destroyed Iran’s military. No, we left it intact. We want regime change. No we don’t. We already accomplished it. We “obliterated” Iran’s nuclear program a year ago. We had to go to war in February to prevent nuclear war. The Strait of Hormuz is open, closed, or something in-between. No deal without “unconditional surrender.” Let’s make a deal!
This everything-all-at-once vibe can be disorienting, particularly since most Americans didn’t have a war with Iran on their bingo cards until the shooting had already started. President Trump didn’t prepare the country or consult with Congress beforehand because he thought it would all be a smashing success in a matter of weeks.
The miscalculation that started it all: killing Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and much of Iran’s senior leadership, on the first day of the war. To “the great proud people of Iran, I say tonight that the hour of your freedom is at hand,” Trump announced on Feb. 28. “When we are finished, take over your government. It will be yours to take. This will be probably your only chance for generations.”
I support regime change in Iran and shed no tears for Khamenei or his goons. But when you start a war by killing the regime’s top leaders, it’s not unreasonable for the remaining ones to conclude that you really intend regime change.
Khamenei was a murderous fanatic, but he was a fairly cautious one. He liked to threaten closing the Strait of Hormuz or attacking our regional allies, but he was reluctant to actually do it, fearing it would invite a regime change war. The mullahs and IRGC goons believed, not unreasonably, that if they lost their grip on power, they’d be lynched by the Iranian people they’ve brutalized for decades.
By starting with a regime change war, Trump removed any reason for the regime not to go for broke. When you have nothing to lose — particularly when you are a millenarian religious fanatic — a Persian Alamo strategy makes a lot of sense.
So Iran closed the Strait of Hormuz and attacked its neighbors.
But it turns out this wasn’t the Alamo. In the contest of wills, Trump blinked. The Iranian regime’s tolerance for punishment proved — so far — to be greater than Trump’s and that of our gulf allies. Militarily we could finish the job, but that would require ground troops and much greater economic turmoil. In a conflict Trump launched unilaterally without the prior support of Congress, NATO or the American people, Trump doesn’t have the political capital for that.
But that’s only half the problem. Trump wants the war over, but he doesn’t want to pay — militarily, economically, politically — what that would cost. So he wants to make a deal that ends it. But there is no deal available that wouldn’t come at an equally undesirable cost. Any deal that looks like what President Obama struck with the Iranians would be too embarrassing to bear. But the Iranians are convinced that they can get just such a deal, and they’re willing to drag things out as long as it takes.
The result: Trump’s in a box of his own making. He thinks he can talk his way out by simply asserting a reality that doesn’t exist. When the financial markets get nervous, he announces a breakthrough that is, at best, a possibility. When the Iranians agree to a deal that looks similar to one Obama might negotiate, Trump goes back to his threats.
It can’t go on forever. But I’m sure it’ll last until long after this column is forgotten.
Jonah Goldberg is editor-in-chief of The Dispatch and the host of The Remnant podcast. His Twitter handle is @JonahDispatch.