Will Hurricane Dolly hit Mar-a-Lago?

We’re already well into the 2026 Atlantic hurricane season, and storm trackers are closely watching what forms near Cape Verde, off the west coast of Africa, that may become the next big storm. So far, America has been hit by four tropical storms. The first three were named Arthur, Bertha and Cristobal, and while none of them strengthened into hurricanes, they did cause damage to Florida and Texas.

The next tropical storm, which was officially named Thursday morning, is called Dolly. This strange coincidence has nothing to do with Dolly Parton, the singer-songwriter, actress and philanthropist who died Tuesday morning at the age of 80. The naming of tropical storms and hurricanes is a job for the World Meteorological Organization, which rotates them out every six years and retires them after a given storm causes too much destruction. After all, it would be weird and potentially triggering to ever see another Hurricane Katrina.

The next storms to be named this year will be Edouard, Fay and Gonzalo, and the list goes on. But for now, all eyes are on Dolly, meaning there’s a non-zero chance the storm strengthens into Hurricane Dolly, heads straight for Palm Beach and levels Mar–a-Lago, which would have obvious implications for our commander in chief. At the moment, there is no evidence to suggest such an event is going to happen; again, the odds are pretty low. Still, judging by trends on social media, it seems a lot of people are tickled by the idea that such an outcome is even remotely possible.

I can’t count myself in their company, knowing that the collateral damage would likely be massive. But there’s a broad swath of Americans who love that kind of cosmic irony, and I understand where they’re coming from. I don’t want to check, but I’m sure everyone’s favorite betting apps will offer odds on this event, though even Polymarket and Kalshi may know better than to piss off the president.

Giving storms human-style names is arguably a weird relic that is bound to create some chatter whenever this kind of overlap occurs, but storms used to be named after Catholic saints, politicians and figures from Polynesian mythology, so it could be weirder. The U.S. military used to give them code names. Who wants to be hit by a Hurricane Easy? But that happened in 1950, and the storm was indirectly responsible for killing two people.

Last year, exactly zero hurricanes hit the U.S. mainland, which is kind of a bizarre blessing, although we’ve had dead-quiet hurricane seasons before. (Caribbean nations like Jamaica were absolutely pummeled by Hurricane Melissa in 2025, so it wasn’t all positive.) This year, we’ll be lucky to avoid collision with a massive, destructive storm.

Here’s where I tap the climate change sign and remind folks we’re still burning fossil fuels at an unprecedented rate as oil and gas companies rake in obscene profits, even as renewable energy goes increasingly mainstream. Those emissions are making our oceans hotter and our atmosphere able to hold more water, producing the ingredients for a really bad hurricane, no matter where it makes landfall, either Palm Beach or Pittsburgh.

But we might need to turn our focus to the other side of the continent right now. As the New York Times reported a few weeks ago, “thanks to El Niño, the Pacific Ocean faces a higher than normal risk of hurricanes this year — increasing the likelihood that a major storm will break from this predictable path and strike California, Mexico or Hawaii, federal meteorologists have warned.”

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Indeed, Hurricane Lala was just such a devastating and anomalous storm, sweeping past Hawaii earlier this month and becoming the first hurricane in 155 years to directly hit the Big Island since 1871, when an unnamed hurricane struck but never officially made landfall. Lala carried a record wind gust of 140 miles per hour, recorded on the peak of Mauna Kea, while across the state more than 100 homes were damaged or destroyed by cataclysmic flooding. Three people were killed. Over two days, the deluge was equivalent to nearly two million Olympic-size pools of water. Talk about weird weather that the name Lala doesn’t even come close to reflecting.

The reason why Hurricane Lala was so strange and violent has a lot to do with the record-breaking El Niño, a normal pattern of climate variation tied to wind and sea surface temperatures over the tropical Pacific. But combined with climate change, El Niño is becoming supercharged, which is why 2026 is likely to be the hottest in recorded human history. Just a few days ago, sea surface temperatures hit the warmest level ever recorded. We can expect a lot more extreme weather disasters, including hurricanes, droughts and floods, as a result.

Yes, the ultimate irony would be to see our climate change-denying president’s dumb little resort getting swept out to sea, assuming no bystanders were injured. But that’s a lot of big ifs stuffed into a trenchcoat, parading around social media as an inevitability. When it seems like harmless fun, my motto is to let people enjoy it. Given what Dolly Parton stood for and what our president doesn’t, it might almost seem like her ghost would be seeking vengeance, despite Trump’s insistence that she actually liked him. Although there’s no evidence that Parton, who carefully avoided overt politics, was a MAGA fan — far more clues indicate her political orientation pointed in the opposite direction — exacting lethal revenge, even on her worst enemies, wouldn’t have been true to her character.

To borrow an old Bill McKibben bit, maybe we should start naming hurricanes after fossil fuel companies like ExxonMobil or Saudi Aramco. Would seeing your house flattened by Hurricane Shell wake people up? I’d suggest Hurricane Donny, but we’ve already been drowning in that one for far too long.