At 2:35 p.m. on a rainy Saturday, the Really Big One hits: A 9.1-magnitude Cascadia subduction earthquake rips a 600-mile-long gash in the earth’s crust from Vancouver to the California state line, pancaking freeways and igniting gas lines.

Metro Seattle is devastated; emergency services are overwhelmed. Nobody knows who’s in charge.

The White House Briefing Room is tense as drone footage fills the screens — dazed families wandering through ruined streets.

A reporter yells: “Mr. President — what are we doing to help them?”

At the podium, the president leans into the microphone: "We are following the plan we laid out in my executive order of Mar. 18. We are relying on the state."

Fortunately, this scenario is fictional. The executive order, however, is all too real. It is the Trump’s attempt to offload responsibility for disasters to state and local governments, seeking to “inject common sense into decisions that make our communities resilient.”

We shall see how common this common sense is in the early hours of the Really Big One, as the multitude of white-hot issues, obstacles and........

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