Illustration by Tom Bachtell

Donald Trump is a man given to superlatives, and last week, in Puerto Rico, where he had flown for the first of two trips to survey scenes of disaster—the aftermath of Hurricane Maria there, and a mass shooting in Las Vegas—he offered one up. At a briefing in an airport hangar, Trump introduced Representative Jenniffer González Colón by saying that she “actually represents the largest number of people of any congressperson in the United States. I know that. It’s 3.5 million people.” Observers might have been forgiven for thinking he didn’t know that: in the two weeks since Maria had hit, Trump had repeatedly avoided acknowledging that Puerto Ricans are citizens of the United States.

Nevertheless, González Colón, Puerto Rico’s sole representative, is not a full member of Congress—technically, she is a resident commissioner—and she cannot vote on passing legislation. And although Puerto Ricans can vote in Presidential elections if they move to one of the states, they cannot do so on the island, which has no Electoral College votes. Indeed, the crisis in Puerto Rico is a case study of what happens when people with little political capital need the help of their government. (The U.S. Virgin Islands, which were also struck by Hurricane Maria, are in a similarly dire situation.) Aid, in the form of both logistical equipment and waivers on programs such as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, was slow in arriving, compared with the help extended to Florida and Texas after Hurricanes Harvey and Irma. Days after Trump’s visit, nearly half the population was still without clean water, some ninety per cent had no electricity, and sewage pooled in the streets.

The island had voices that could plead, but not enough that could demand by, say, threatening to withhold a key vote in Congress if action wasn’t taken. (Tellingly, politicians in New York and Florida, where the Puerto Rican diaspora’s vote counts, were among the quickest to respond to the crisis.) The President has made it clear that what he expects as a price for his attention is an absence of criticism. In Puerto Rico, he said that the “nice” people there had given him and his team “the highest grades” and didn’t “play politics.” Earlier, he had dismissed those who did otherwise as “ingrates.”

If Puerto Rico is a story about the cost of the lack of political representation, Las Vegas is about the consequences of a lack of political courage. In that city, Stephen Paddock, a single gunman in a thirty-second-floor hotel room, killed fifty-eight people, attending an outdoor concert hundreds of yards away, within the space of ten minutes. Trump argued that the catastrophe had nothing to do with anything except Paddock’s “evil,” and the Republican Party was right alongside him. Repeating what has become a standard G.O.P. line, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said that it was “particularly inappropriate” to talk about gun-safety measures after a mass shooting. But Paddock was able to kill so many people—leaving nearly five hundred more injured—because of a distinctly American political pathology: a resistance to laws regulating the ownership of guns, including assault weapons. Paddock had twenty-three guns in his hotel room; he owned more than forty, thirty-three of which he had bought legally in the past year, in a buying spree that had triggered no alerts.

Too many politicians treat the gun lobby and other donors as their true constituents, even though polls show that a majority of Americans would support common-sense gun legislation. After the shooting at Sandy Hook, whose victims included all the children in a first-grade class except a girl who had played dead, legislation was introduced calling for a universal background check that would have closed the so-called gun-show loophole. Seventy-four per cent of the National Rifle Association’s members supported such a measure, but the N.R.A. itself lobbied against it, and it was defeated in the Senate.

The Nevada shooting revealed that the gun laws are more lax than most people knew. Nearly everyone supports the existing prohibition on the sale of almost all fully automatic weapons—that is, machine guns. A dozen of the guns in Paddock’s hotel room were semi-automatic AR-15-style assault rifles, but he had at least one “bump stock,” an accessory that allowed the rifles to fire as if they were automatic. Bump stocks can be purchased legally; until last week, Walmart sold them on its Web site. This means that there isn’t really a ban on the sale of machine guns, just a rule that requires dealers to sell them in two parts.

Last Thursday, the N.R.A. said that it was open to discussing some regulations, though not a ban, on bump stocks. Passing any regulation would be a victory, but this would be a small, sad one, leaving unmodified semi-automatic rifles—the kind of gun used at Sandy Hook and in many other mass shootings—readily available. Meanwhile, a vote on a bill to deregulate silencers, absurdly packaged in the House as the Hearing Protection Act, was delayed after the Las Vegas shooting, in part because it raised questions about what might have happened if Paddock had had one. (The Senate version is the Silencers Help Us Save Hearing, or SHUSH, Act.) But the bill is still in play, as is one that would allow more people to carry concealed weapons across state lines.

When one pretends that politics have no role, problems can be viewed as mere quirks of chance and of character. In this light, Hurricane Maria was a natural disaster that had nothing to do with climate change, and Puerto Ricans just needed to stop behaving as if, in Trump’s words, everything should be “done for them.” (His idea of doing things for them involved tossing out rolls of paper towels, as if they were hats at one of his rallies.) Similarly, Stephen Paddock was an aberration—“The wires are screwed up,” Trump noted—and Las Vegas was “a miracle,” because, thanks to the quick actions of first responders, the death toll wasn’t higher. According to the Gun Violence Archive, there have been nearly three hundred mass shootings this year. The wonder will be if there isn’t another one before all the Las Vegas victims are out of the hospital, just as it can be no surprise that, while Trump was in Nevada, another storm, Nate, was gathering over the warming waters of the Caribbean.

The atmosphere is packed with carbon dioxide, and American homes are filled with high-powered guns. Both situations demand a political response, not as a partisan exercise but as a common calling. We live in a republic of lowered expectations, but we can insist on more, from our President and from ourselves. ♦