How Long Can the U.S. Escape an Atlantic Hurricane?

This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture.

Sign up for it here.

Every president likes to take credit for good news on their watch, but most of them have at least a little shame about it.

Not Donald Trump.

September 10 is typically the peak of Atlantic Ocean hurricane season.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration expected a relatively restrained year, but as the meteorologist and hurricane specialist Michael Lowry writes , the season “has never gone beyond September 11th in the reliable records (since at least 1950) without a hurricane” in the Atlantic Ocean—until this year.

There aren’t even any strong prospects forming.

Amid spreading violence in the Middle East, warnings of an AI apocalypse, and high fuel prices, it’s a rare piece of good news, and Trump wants credit.

Over the weekend, the White House flagged the news, commenting , “Thank you, President Trump!” This is absurd, though maybe no one should be surprised that a man who believed that marking a map with Sharpie can change a hurricane’s path would take credit for a low-key storm season. (He also reportedly once suggested attacking storms with nuclear weapons, so perhaps, as the journalist Catherine Rampell jokes , this is deterrence in action.) Better explanations than presidential benevolence exist.

As my colleague Joshua Partlow has reported , this is an unusual year for the El Niño cycle.

In the Pacific Ocean, it has produced very warm water, as well as a number of hurricanes.

Hawaii, which is seldom hit, has been struck by two hurricanes so far this year.

At least four deaths have been attributed to the storms, and power remains out on some parts of the island of Kauai.

But scientists say that El Niño also accounts for the absence of major storms, so far, in the Atlantic.