CNN puts TDS on full display with 'slanderous' blame for deadly Nepal floods

Trump derangement syndrome is alive and well at CNN, as evidenced by its latest attempt to pin a disaster halfway around the world on the administration.

A glacier near the Nepal-Tibet border in the Himalayan Mountains collapsed on Aug. 26, resulting in a devastating avalanche that hit the valley below hard enough to generate energy equivalent to a 5.2-magnitude earthquake and in floodwaters that surged downstream at over 60 miles per hour, swallowing up towns and sweeping away thousands of victims.

After getting called out for its propaganda, CNN edited its article and posted a ‘clarification.’

CNN didn’t wait long to suggest that the Trump administration was at least partly responsible for the horrific natural disaster, which has claimed over 1,114 lives.

CNN ran an article Wednesday with the headline, “The Trump administration cut funds for natural hazards monitoring in Nepal. A year later, disaster struck.”

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Although the corresponding article by CNN’s D.C.-based climate reporter Andrew Freedman has since been heavily edited, republications of the original article reveal the original framing:

In January 2025, the Trump administration cut off funding for a long-running natural hazards program that aimed to identify and monitor landslide hotspots in Nepal. Just over a year later, more than 1,100 people perished when a huge glacier and rock landslide high in the Himalayas triggered fast-moving floodwaters that struck Nepal and China.

The original article insinuated not only a causal link between the conclusion of the SERVIR-Hindu Kush Himalaya initiative and the deadly fallout of the floods but that the initiative was dismantled along with the U.S. Agency for International Development by the Trump administration “partly through the work of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE).”

Freedman did not respond to a request for comment from Blaze News.

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Arun SANKAR/AFP/Getty Images

CNN also seemingly blamed the Trump administration for the disaster in a tweet Wednesday that appears to have been deleted. In response to the tweet, State Department spokesman Tommy Pigott wrote, “This outrageous, slanderous tweet is as bad faith as they come and ignores key information we provided in advance. CNN should be ashamed.”

Pigott hit CNN with a reality check, noting that the the SERVIR-Hindu Kush Himalaya initiative “was not built to generate real-time flood warnings. The program was never an end-to-end flood early warning system; it provided satellite data to map dangerous glacial lakes and maintain glacier inventories. Even so, its core tools and services remain active today through [the International Center for Integrated Mountain Development].”

The State Department spokesman noted further that the Trump administration still supports Nepal’s flood warning capacity through a grant to the World Meteorological Organization as well as through an interagency agreement with “the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA/NWS) that works with Nepal’s Department of Hydrology and Meteorology and emergency managers to strengthen early warning for rapid and effective disaster response.”

After getting called out for its propaganda, CNN edited its article and posted a “clarification” stating that “this headline and story have been updated to better reflect the extent of the Project SERVIR-Hindu Kush Himalaya program.”

Now, the article acknowledges that:

“the program the administration cut would not have been able to prevent the disaster that happened this past week”;

“the January 2025 funding cut came before the administration’s reorganization of the US Agency for International Development (USAID)”; and

the U.S. still supports flood mitigation programs in Nepal.

Despite updating the article, CNN is still feeling the heat.

Eric Trump wrote, “This must be one of the most idiotic stories ever authored. Trump is to blame for a glacier collapse on the other side of the earth? American taxpayers are responsible for funding ‘landslide monitoring’ in Nepal? CNN is a total joke.”

“You’re not journalists you’re propagandists,” tweeted Michael Shellenberger, the founder of Public News.

The notion that lives on in CNN’s edited article that the disaster could have been predicted or averted has been shot to pieces by real scientists.

Manoochehr Shirzaei, a geophysicist at Virginia Tech, told Nature that the event would have been difficult to predict with existing monitoring techniques, which look for extreme weather and glacial-lake outburst floods, not sudden collapses in mountain glacier-rock systems.

Saswata Sanyal, intervention manager for disaster risk reduction at ICIMOD, similarly suggested to the New York Times that traditional monitoring wouldn’t have been enough, stating, “There were sensors for flood, flash flood risk, right? But there were not sensors for this kind of ice avalanche.”

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