Last week, the Daily Wire revealed that FEMA workers in Florida received instructions from their supervisor, Marn’i Washington, telling them to avoid houses with Trump signs. Over the weekend, FEMA self-righteously apologized and let everyone know that it had fired Washington. Now, though, Washington has gone on the Roland Martin show to explain that what she did is standard FEMA operating practice. Listening to her muddy use of language, the real question is whether those Trump supporters are actually dangerous or if they just give FEMA workers the “sadz,” an institutional attitude that’s not Washington’s fault.

In the video below, you can hear Washington, a FEMA reservist who also had a day job (from which she was fired, too), explain that she doesn’t have any specific evidence about dangerous Trump voters. Instead, for privacy reasons, FEMA records will just record that a certain community was dangerous. That’s why if there are too many hostile encounters, FEMA workers will just avoid a whole neighborhood—and Trump signs were associated with this level of hostility. Washington added that she didn’t even vote in this election, admitting that she was too busy, although she implies that she’s non-partisan (which may, of course, be true).

Image: X screen grab.

Washington explained that there are a lot of safety rules for FEMA workers. For example, if they see people who painted purple markings on their property, that means that the homeowners will shoot trespassers. FEMA workers avoid those houses.

What does stand out is how Washington describes those houses that can cause a whole neighborhood to be blacklisted. Thus, she says that homeowners saying “drain the Swamp” was considered a reason to avoid homes in a community.

That raises the question, of course, about what standard for avoidance workers exercised. Were they avoiding homes where they felt genuinely threatened, or did they feel threatened merely because a homeowner was grumbling about the current government?

There is a difference—and the giveaway about the high level of sensitivity FEMA workers might have shown is that Washington says “nobody needs to work in a hostile work environment” and that “three or four encounters that have made the team uncomfortable” may mean abandoning an entire street, especially if there are lots of Trump signs on the street.

The problem is that a hostile work environment or a comment that makes people feel uncomfortable is not the same as a dangerous work environment. Grumbling, non-dangerous people are taxpayers entitled to FEMA benefits, the same as everyone else. In other words, what’s really at issue here is whether FEMA workers are legitimately walking away from dangerous situations or if they’re abandoning people whose political views are opposed to their own.  

Without further investigation, the blame game doesn’t quite work here. It’s entirely possible that FEMA has an institutional practice of discriminating against Trump supporters. It’s equally possible that some people are legitimately threatening FEMA workers for both political and non-political reasons and that this time around Trump signs were a good indicator of potentially dangerous hostility, making it reasonable to avoid those neighborhoods.

The one thing that’s clear is that Marn’i Washington is not an outlier. The only thing that’s unclear is whether the practice itself passes muster.