In the aftermath of Hurricane Helen, former President Donald Trump slammed the Biden administration’s disaster response and even accused Democratic leadership of ignoring the needs of Republican hurricane victims.
But a review of Trump’s record by POLITICO’s E&E News and interviews with two former Trump White House officials show the former president has been overtly partisan at times in his response to disasters, at least three times It became clear that the United States was reluctant to provide disaster relief to areas it considered politically hostile. Or ordered special treatment for pro-Trump states.
Mark Harvey, who served as the senior director for resilience policy on the National Security Council staff in the Trump administration, told E&E News on Wednesday that President Trump initially planned to He said he refused to approve disaster aid because of the state’s Democratic leanings.
But Mr. Harvey said Mr. Trump changed his mind after Mr. Harvey pulled poll results showing there were more Trump supporters in California’s hard-hit Orange County than in all of Iowa. .
This interaction has not been previously reported.
“We even looked at how many votes he got in the affected areas…to show him that these are the people who voted for you,” she said, along with more than 100 other Republicans in recent days. said Harvey, who along with former national security officials supported Vice President Kamala Harris. .
Both Mr. Harvey and former Trump Homeland Security Adviser Olivia Troy, who supported Mr. Harvey’s claims, say the president is approaching Hurricane Helen with a similar mindset. They allege that the disaster, which killed more than 170 people in six states, is being used politically. Troy, who also supports Harris for president, accused Trump of trying to distract from his political responsibility for disaster response.
He said that if Trump wins the White House again, he will view the disaster through a political lens that values personal loyalty over considering the damage.
“It’s not about American voters who don’t really care about politics, whose homes are gone, and the president of the United States is judging them by how they vote, but they don’t vote. I didn’t even do it.’ Please vote,” Troy said in an interview Wednesday.
Troy, who played a leading role in the federal disaster response, said local political leaders regularly called her office for help after President Trump refused to sign documents authorizing aid. He said he called. Troy said he had to repeatedly pressure former Vice President Mike Pence.
Harvey added: “There’s no sympathy for the survivor. What’s important is the photo shoot, right? Disaster theater to make him look good.”
The Trump campaign did not respond to E&E News’ requests for comment.
On Monday, President Trump turned his visit to flood-ravaged Valdosta, Georgia, into a partisan attack. He said the Biden administration and North Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper (D) were not going to “go out of their way to help people in Republican areas” and that Republican governors were unable to call the president. falsely claimed.
Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp and South Carolina Gov. Henry McMaster, both Republicans, acknowledged that was not the case and praised the federal government’s response. Virginia Governor Glenn Youngkin (R) also praised the Biden administration’s response to Helen, which affected the southeastern part of the state.
Mr. Trump is the only political leader to accuse President Joe Biden of ignoring the Republican victims of Hurricane Helen, but his four years in the White House have shown him to be at times underwhelming when it comes to disaster response. This shows that he was playing his favorite game.
“They love me in the Panhandle. …What do they need?”
Shortly after taking office in early 2019, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis met with President Trump at the White House and asked him a favor.
A few months ago, when Mr. DeSantis was running for governor, Hurricane Michael wreaked havoc in the Florida Panhandle.
DeSantis asked, “Will the president order the Federal Emergency Management Agency to pay 100 percent of recovery costs instead of the usual 75 percent?”
“This is Trump country, and they need your help,” DeSantis told the president, according to the Republican governor’s autobiography, “The Courage to Be Free.”
“They love me from the Panhandle,” Trump replied, according to DeSantis, who was preparing to run for president in 2023. “I must have gotten 90 percent of the votes. Big crowd. What do they need?”
On March 9, 2019, President Trump signed an order directing FEMA to pay 100 percent of most of Florida’s disaster costs. As a result, FEMA paid out about $350 million more than it would have paid without President Trump’s intervention, according to an E&E News analysis.
But less than two months later, President Trump passed a disaster aid package in Congress that would make FEMA pay for all the costs of Hurricane Maria, which killed more than 3,000 people in Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands. threatened to veto it.
The White House said in a January 16, 2019 policy statement that it “strongly opposes” the proposal.
“Cost sharing is important to ensure that work with affected jurisdictions is collaborative and that both partners have incentives to operate efficiently and control costs,” the Office of Management and Budget wrote. are.
This bill was rejected in the Senate.
Presidents often increase the federal share of disaster costs for the worst disasters. Trump himself increased federal funding after 23 disasters occurred during his administration, including after Hurricane Maria, according to a Congressional Research Service report.
Trump paid full price for Maria, but only with FEMA funds spent on debris removal and emergency protection. Under the bill, which Trump opposed, FEMA would have paid 100% of Maria’s entire recovery costs, including reconstruction.
The Department of Homeland Security’s inspector general has released eight reports criticizing FEMA’s response to Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands during the Trump administration. The department oversees FEMA.
A 2020 IG report found that FEMA “mismanaged the distribution” of $257 million in goods that “took an average of 69 days” to reach their destination.
The report also revealed that FEMA was feeding Puerto Rican hurricane survivors junk food such as Oreos, Cinnamon Toast Crunch cereal, and Airheads candy. “After Hurricane Harvey, vendors were limited in their ability to provide nutritious meals and were unable to produce more to support efforts in Puerto Rico,” the IG wrote.
The Department of Housing and Urban Development’s inspector general found that the White House delayed disbursing $8.3 billion in HUD disaster relief funds for Puerto Rico that Congress approved in February 2018. HUD officials told the IG that the White House conducted a review process that included: It has never been needed before. ”
This funding was allocated in January 2020.
The Trump administration also withheld a report for nearly two years that could help push Congress to improve HUD’s disaster assistance programs, E&E News reported. The report was completed in April 2019 and released the day before Trump left office.
Mr. Harvey, a former special assistant to President Trump, remembers trying to pressure Mr. Trump to take money to Puerto Rico.
“It was very much a business-like deal, and it was like, ‘This is a lot of money,’ and what can we get in return?” Harvey said. “We still had a lot of stalls, stalls, stalls. Don’t give them what they need yet.”
“It just becomes a pattern of, ‘We don’t give awards, they’re not my people.'” It becomes, ‘I’m here to help my people, but they’re not my people. Therefore, I have no responsibility to help them.” is the general feeling. ”
Trump’s approach to Puerto Rico stands in contrast to his response to another disaster in Alabama, where he won 63% of the vote in 2016.
In early 2019, days after a tornado killed 23 people in Alabama, President Trump tweeted, “FEMA is reaching out to me directly to give A-plus treatment to the state of Alabama and the wonderful people who were devastated by the tornadoes. “I was told,” he wrote. ”
There is no evidence that FEMA has given Alabama any special treatment.
Expert: Voters want partnership, not partisanship
The gloomy view of Trump’s response to the disaster is not shared by all former Trump officials.
President Trump’s former FEMA administrator, Brock Long, denied that the president has been slow to provide aid to Democratic areas. He said evidence lies in the amount of money sent to California for wildfire recovery and to Puerto Rico after Maria.
But Long said the agency has been subject to politicization from both Republicans and Democrats for too long.
Mr. Long, who traveled to North Carolina this week, described the destruction as “generational” damage and said it would be extremely harmful to drag recovery into the campaign trail.
That’s why he doesn’t want a political appointee to head FEMA.
“In a disaster like this, you want politics to save you from the disaster and you want us to be able to focus on the people who are hurting,” Long said. “Let’s have a government agency that can function and get its job done without politics on both sides.”
President Trump has authorized 89 disasters in states that oppose him, including 17 in California, more than any other state, an E&E News analysis of FEMA data showed.
More than 80% of the disaster requests President Trump rejected came from governors in states he won in 2016, according to E&E News, which analyzed FEMA data.
“There’s really no difference that I’ve seen,” Chad Burginis, executive director of the State Floodplain Managers Association, said in an interview this week.
“Brock Long, like DeAnne Criswell, is doing as good a job as he can as an emergency manager trying to meet the authorities’ intent,” Berginis said. he said, referring to FEMA administrators under President Joe Biden.
It is not yet clear how Hurricane Helen will affect the key battleground states of Georgia and North Carolina. But one political expert said President Trump’s use of Hurricane Helen as an election bludgeon may not yield the electoral benefits he thinks it would.
Joshua Meadow, a political science professor at Clayton State University in Georgia, said voters don’t want partisan attacks in times of crisis, but rather a willingness to work with whoever is needed to rebuild communities and provide life-saving supplies. said.
Mr. Meadow is known for his partnership with President Barack Obama and New Jersey Republican Governor Chris Christie after Hurricane Sandy in 2012 (memorialized in a photo of the two hugging) and after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. – Cited President W. Bush’s appeal for unity.
Instead, Trump showed up in a devastated community in Georgia “wearing a regular suit and a red hat,” Meadow said.
“It was a very political moment that was unnecessary,” Meadow said. “I think if he took it down a little bit more, he could have played very well. But that’s not going to play for people who are on the fence or completely on the other side.”