It seems that Brock Long, the beleaguered FEMA chief, has been taking lessons from Donald Trump. In a series of Sunday television appearances, Long declared that the figures for Hurricane Maria’s official death toll are “all over the place,” and that it’s “hard to tell what’s accurate and what’s not,” despite Puerto Rican officials accepting the results of a study conducted by George Washington University, which found that nearly 3,000 people ultimately lost their lives as a result of the storm. Asked on NBC’s Meet the Press if he thought the study was, as Trump has suggested, a politically motivated smear cooked up by Democrats, Long was equivocal: “I don’t know why the studies were done,” he said. “You might see more indirect deaths occur as time goes on because people have heart attacks due to stress, they fall off their house trying to fix their roof, they die in car crashes because they went through an intersection where the stop lights weren’t working. The other thing that goes on—there’s all kinds of studies on this that we can take a look at—spousal abuse goes through the roof. You can’t blame spousal abuse after a disaster on anybody.”

Long’s press circuit was supposed to center on FEMA’s response to Hurricane Florence. Instead, the line of questioning was largely focused on Trump’s take on the Maria death toll (“If a person died for any reason, like old age, just add them onto the list. Bad politics. I love Puerto Rico!” he tweeted last week), and the security of his job at FEMA, where he is currently the subject of a D.H.S. probe after allegedly misusing government resources to travel between Washington and his home in North Carolina (allegations he has denied). On Friday, The Wall Street Journal reported that the White House contemplated replacing Long before Hurricane Florence hit the East Coast, but John Kelly chose to leave him in his role until the probe had been completed. And, last week, Politico noted that Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen had asked Long to think about resigning, but he declined the offer.

For Long, then, who needs to win the approval of a media-hooked, flattery-obsessed boss, questioning the veracity of the death toll on-air was a savvy tactical maneuver, which served the dual purpose of absolving FEMA of blame. Despite Trump’s attempts to downplay the weak federal response to the crisis in Puerto Rico, in July the agency’s official after-action report admitted to making multiple mistakes. For example, a week after the hurricane hit, it said, officials did not have information on the status of 37 out of 69 hospitals. Still, on Sunday, Long denied the larger implications of this statistic, arguing that the crucial figure to be considered is “direct deaths—which is the wind; the water and the waves; buildings collapsing.”

That Long would adopt a Trumpian line to save his own skin is relatively unsurprising—blame-shifting is, after all, a time-honored tradition in the current administration. In a way, Long is the perfect archetype for the cycle of corruption that absorbs anyone in Trump’s orbit: his minions happily take advantage of a White House where grift goes unchallenged, frequently enjoying themselves at taxpayers’ expense. When they’re inevitably found out, they’re forced to curry favor with the president in an effort to retain their jobs. The more his flunkies get into trouble, the deeper they must bend the knee to stay in his good graces. This is surely how the FEMA administrator found himself on television, refusing to reject Trump’s assertion that the death toll from Hurricane Maria was, in the president’s words, “done by the Democrats in order to make me look as bad as possible when I was successfully raising billions of dollars to help rebuild Puerto Rico.” Asked by Meet the Press whether he had plans to resign, Long responded: “No. No, no, no, I’m here to serve my country every day. That’s all I do.”