Twenty years ago, Hurricane Katrina struck the Gulf Coast with a force our communities will never forget. Entire neighborhoods were swept away. Families were displaced. Lives were lost.

The devastation that Mississippi endured in August 2005 remains one of the most painful chapters in our state’s history. 

Even in the darkest hours, the people of Mississippi showed the strength of their spirit. Neighbors helped each other clear debris. Churches and community groups opened their doors. Volunteers from across the nation joined hands with us to begin the long process of rebuilding. The resilience born out of tragedy has defined us ever since. 

Over the last two decades, Mississippi has rebuilt not only our homes and businesses, but also our sense of community and determination. Our Gulf Coast is once again a hub of commerce, tourism and industry. New schools, stronger infrastructure and revitalized neighborhoods stand as proof of what can be accomplished when we work together. We still bear the scars of Katrina, but we also carry the lessons of preparedness, resilience and faith. 

Still, our recovery is not yet finished. To this day, some Mississippi cities and communities are waiting for FEMA to release funding for critical infrastructure projects made necessary by Katrina’s damage. Local governments that stepped up to rebuild have been left holding the bill.

That is unacceptable. Federal promises made to our people in the aftermath of disaster must be kept. Our delegation remains committed to cutting through the bureaucracy and making sure every community gets the resources it was promised. 

As we reflect on the 20th anniversary of Katrina, we are reminded that natural disasters remain a reality for our state. Whether it is hurricanes, tornadoes or flooding, Mississippians know the importance of standing shoulder to shoulder in the face of adversity. Our Coast Guard, first responders and National Guard remain on the front lines, and our communities continue to show the same spirit of service and sacrifice that carried us through in 2005. 

We are proud to represent a state that does not back down when tested. We will keep fighting for Mississippi’s fair share of disaster relief funding, for stronger protections against future storms and for the people who call this place home. 

On this solemn anniversary, we honor the lives lost, the families forever changed and the communities reshaped by Hurricane Katrina. We also honor the enduring Mississippi spirit — the grit, faith and neighborly love that remind us that no matter the storm, we will rise together. 

Mississippi has faced the worst of nature, and we continue to stand strong — together, and ready for whatever lies ahead. 

Mike Ezell represents Mississippi’s 4th Congressional District, Michael Guest represents Mississippi’s 3rd Congressional District and Bennie Thompson represents Mississippi’s 2nd Congressional District. Cindy Hyde-Smith is the junior U.S. senator for Mississippi and Roger Wicker is its senior U.S. senator.

Like all good flimfam artists, President Trump is a master of misdirection. 

As Americans grow increasingly skeptical of his inflationary tariffs, deficit-swelling tax cuts and senseless push to gut federal agencies and research, he floods the zone with a firehose of falsehoods to shift media and public attention elsewhere.  

Take his grandstanding plan to dispatch U.S. troops to Chicago and other cities, as he’s already done to Los Angeles and Washington, D.C. It’s a classic “wag the dog” ploy with a Trumpian twist: Instead of fabricating a foreign military crisis to divert voters from their domestic woes, he’s invading America’s blue metros.

Crime and public disorder, including sprawling homeless encampments, are serious problems. But a rational president would partner with local leaders to alleviate them instead of putting our cities under military occupation.

Trump’s grotesquely exaggerated claims of urban anarchy discredit America in the world’s eyes so he can score political points at home. Hard-core Republicans eat it up, but the rest of the country seems unswayed by the president’s gaslighting.

The president’s job approval rating has slipped to 38 percent in the Pew Center’s latest poll. Voters also give Trump’s main policy initiatives a thumbs down. 

They strongly disapprove (61-38) of his tariffs, the retro centerpiece of Trumponomics. A solid majority of 55 percent say they lack confidence in Trump’s ability to make good decisions on economic policy.

Voters evidently aren’t big fans of DOGE either; nearly two-to-one, they say Trump is making the federal government work worse rather than better. And they disapprove of Trump’s budget-busting mega-bill by a 10-point margin (42-32). 

Trump is losing ground among independents, soft-core Republicans, young voters and people who didn’t vote in 2024. This might sound like celestial music to Democrats, but for one jarring note: They are even less popular than Trump and his party.    

A sobering Wall Street Journal poll last month found that 63 percent of voters hold an unfavorable view of the Democratic Party — the highest level in the 35 years they have been asking the question. 

Even as they give Trump low grades on tariffs, inflation and foreign policy, voters say they trust Republicans more than Democrats to handle every major issue except health care. 

Here’s another way to fathom the hole Democrats have dug themselves into. A New York Times study found that, between the 2020 and 2024 elections, Democrats lost ground to Republicans in every one of the 30 states that track voter registration by party. In total, there was a net swing of 4.5 million to the Republicans.

Rather than reckon with such grim realities, Democrats again are seeking refuge in the politics of evasion. It takes two forms: Calls for intensifying “resistance” to Trump and the beguiling hope that success in next year’s midterm election will spare them a bruising factional fight over the party’s core principles and purposes.

Of course, Democrats should call out Trump’s destructive policies, blatant abuses of power and his diabolical knack for setting Americans at each other’s throats. But if that’s all they do, they’ll just be advertising their political impotence.

There’s a reasonable chance that, given the usual anti-incumbent dynamics of a midterm election, Democrats will recapture the House next year and thus be able to offer more than rhetorical resistance to Trump.

That’s why the president has instructed pliant Republicans in Texas and Missouri not to wait until the next census to draw new political maps. He wants them to gerrymander more Republican House seats in time for next year’s election. It’s not as bad as Jan. 6, but it reminds us that Trump is America’s election-rigger-in-chief.  

But even if Democrats manage to eke out a midterm win, taking control of one chamber on Capitol Hill won’t fix their structural problem: the steady hemorrhaging over the past quarter-century of non-college voters, lately compounded by severe erosions among Black and Hispanic as well as young voters.  

Without winning back a sizable chunk of working-class voters, Democrats won’t be able to compete nationally or build the large and lasting majorities they need to blunt today’s reactionary populism and govern effectively. 

There’s only one way to do that: Show the country they’ve changed. That starts by publicly acknowledging mistakes, like not taking public anger over illegal immigration and crime seriously. It also means repudiating the illiberal excesses of identity politics and embracing cultural moderation.  

Democrats also should jettison factory nostalgia and leave protectionism and industrial policy to Trump and right-wing populists. They need a modern, forward-looking strategy for repairing the broken engine of upward mobility for non-college workers.  

A new Democratic blueprint for abundant growth and opportunity would be both pro-worker and pro-business and play to America’s strengths in innovation and entrepreneurship. 

It would give priority to driving down housing, health care and energy costs, promoting competition in consolidated markets, creating more “earn and learn” opportunities for workers without college degrees to hone their job skills, radically improving public schools, restoring fiscal responsibility in Washington and making government nimbler and more user-friendly.  

Let’s face it: All this will require a rupture with a party establishment that’s grown too comfortable with a status quo that serves entrenched interest groups and affluent elites but leaves working Americans on the outside looking in. 

Democrats should be heartened that Americans are beginning to see through Trump’s reality-distorting attempts to play them for suckers. But it’s not enough for Trump to sink — Democrats must rise to the occasion by remaking themselves the party of economic progress and political change America needs.  

Will Marshall is founder and president of the Progressive Policy Institute.

Four months after Liberation Day, President Trump is poised to declare victory in his trade war. In July, he trumpeted his latest agreement with the E.U. as “the biggest deal ever made.” 

With the reigniting of Trump’s trade war in early August, the last month has delivered a raft of trade headlines as foreign emissaries have scurried to the White House to make deals. Even if these makeshift agreements result in marked reduction from Trump’s Liberation Day tariffs, all indications point to the U.S. entering a far more protectionist era.

Ever the showman, Trump loves touting his trade war’s “success” by pointing to reopened factories and re-shored jobs. Strategically speaking, it’s brilliant retail politics. Ribbon-cutting at revived plants, flanked by dozens of smiling workers, make for great publicity.

Alas, Trump’s cunning marketing ploy has resurrected one of the oldest and most notorious myths in economics: Frédéric Bastiat’s “broken window fallacy.”

Suppose a vandal hurls a rock through a shopkeeper’s window. The shopkeeper is dismayed—this cruel stroke of luck will cost him $1,000. But a local wise guy consoles him, saying, “Actually, there’s a silver lining in this dark cloud!” The broken pane, he explains, creates a job for the local glazier. Perhaps he’ll use those hard-earned shekels to buy shoes from the local cobbler, and so on. Society is ultimately made richer from the shopkeeper’s misfortune — all thanks to the domino effect of spending triggered by two seconds of petty mischief.

It’s a nice story — but as Bastiat illustrates, it’s wildly incomplete. Had the window not been shattered, the shopkeeper could’ve spent his $1,000 on something else he valued. Perhaps he would have bought a new suit, creating income for a local tailor. Or maybe he would have bought some meat, ale, and bread for a party, creating income for the local butcher, brewer, and baker. 

The fatal flaw in the wise guy’s analysis, Bastiat concludes, is confining his theory to “that which is seen” — the income earned by the glazier, the cobbler, etc. In so doing, he ignores “that which is unseen” — everything else the shopkeeper could have bought, had his window not been smashed.

Regrettably, we’ll never see what the shopkeeper would have done with that $1,000. All the products he might have bought and the jobs he might have helped create remain forever hidden in counterfactuals. All we know for certain is that society is poorer to the tune of one window.

Bastiat’s broken window fallacy wasn’t originally about tariffs, but it could have been. The logic is identical: Whether breaking windows or blocking imports, the visible gains in one sector come at the expense of unseen losses elsewhere. In the former case, resources are diverted towards less desirable uses (repairing windows). In the latter, they are diverted to less productive ones.

Should the goal of U.S. trade policy be to raise an army of millions of Americans to assemble iPhones, as Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick suggested? Not if it comes at the expense of better jobs — for example, designing iPhones. If a $25,000 assembly job displaces a $125,000 design job, Americans aren’t $25,000 richer — we’re $100,000 poorer, and plus we will be stuck paying much higher prices for iPhones. Dave Chappelle had it right: Americans want to buy iPhones, not make them. 

Today’s protectionists echo this fallacy with uncanny precision. The fact that trade gets such a bad rap in American politics today is a sad testimony to this myth’s resilience. Tariffs are a clever way for politicians to smash economic windows, then brag about the jobs they create to fix them. 

When Trump hails the “return” of American manufacturing thanks to his tariffs, he is cleverly drawing our attention to that which is seen: Look! New factory jobs! New, American-made products! But beware the sleight of hand. Those gains, while real for a few, come at a hidden cost to the many. 

Economists often focus on the visible consequences of tariffs (higher prices). It’s an understandable instinct, since tariff surcharges are easy to point out. But Bastiat’s parable highlights the unseen consequences — difficult to measure, impossible to point to, but they’re every bit as real and destructive to the economy. 

Free trade, in contrast, avoids breaking windows in the first place. Buying cheaper imports saves Americans money, which they can spend, save, and invest elsewhere in the economy. Globalization doesn’t merely give us cheap washing machines and plentiful dolls. It frees us to specialize in better, higher-paying jobs.

The result isn’t a hollowing out of the middle class or a “giant sucking sound” of jobs leaving the country — it is mass flourishing.

The Trump administration launched today’s trade war on the basis that our persistent trade deficits since 1975 constitute a “national emergency.” Yet over those 50 years, U.S. real GDP per capita has more than doubled, and the real net worth of U.S. households has more than tripled. All the while, the share of the world’s population living in poverty plummeted from 50 percent to 8.5 percent. 

Trump is a brilliant escape artist. He routinely defies the laws of political gravity. But he can’t escape the laws of economics. Restricting trade doesn’t bring us prosperity, any more than paying vandals to destroy property creates wealth. All protectionism delivers is higher costs and a stagnant economy. 

Scott Burns is the Charles E. Blackwell associate professor of economics at Southeastern Louisiana University. Caleb S. Fuller is an associate professor of economics in the Winklevoss School of Business at Grove City College and a Research Fellow with the Independent Institute.