as death As the death toll from Hurricane Helen surpasses 200 and the Southeast remains reeling from the disaster, Donald Trump is working overtime to politicize the tragedy into an attack on his opponent, Vice President Kamala Harris. doing.
Even as governors of both parties have praised the Biden administration’s response, President Trump claims the federal government has abandoned affected communities.
Earlier this week, before visiting a disaster area in Valdosta, Georgia, President Trump baselessly claimed that “the federal government and the Democratic governor[of North Carolina]are not going out of their way to help the people in Republican areas.” But while the former president acted as if he was a capable leader who could handle crises well, his record in the White House suggests otherwise.
In 2018, when wildfires tore through large swathes of California, President Trump initially offered aid to the state because he felt some of the affected areas didn’t like him enough, E&E News reported Thursday. It is said that the approval was refused.
Mark Harvey, then the senior director for resilience policy on Trump’s National Security Council staff, told E&E News, part of Politico, that the former president had enough Trump support in the affected counties. He said he approved the aid only after being shown data to prove that there were victims. .
“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,” Harvey recalled. His account was backed by former Trump aide Olivia Troy.
This is not the only time President Trump has based his response to a national crisis on the politics of those affected. A 2021 report found that the Trump administration blocked nearly $20 billion in hurricane relief to Puerto Rico in the wake of 2017’s Hurricane Maria, which devastated the island. President Trump publicly criticized then-San Juan Mayor Carmen Yulín Cruz, who had criticized him, as “incompetent” and downplayed the severity of the storm, which killed about 3,000 people.
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Last year, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis wrote in his memoir about a conversation he had with President Trump in 2019, when Hurricane Michael hit northern Florida. Mr. DeSantis called on the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) to cover the entire cost of the recovery effort, instead of the standard 75%.
“This is Trump country, and they need your help,” DeSantis pitched Trump.
“They love me in the Panhandle,” the former president said. “I must have gotten 90 percent of the vote. Big crowd. What do they need?” Immediately after the meeting, President Trump asked the federal government for “all eligible costs” related to the hurricane response. signed an executive order ordering the government to pay for the
According to an analysis by E&E News, this decision resulted in FEMA paying “approximately $350 million more than it would have without President Trump’s intervention.”
President Trump’s urge to make politics dependent on his responsibility to the American people has not disappeared since leaving office. Just before politicizing the response to Helen, he threatened to withhold natural disaster aid from Democratic strongholds.
“We’re not going to give him the money to put out all the fires,” President Trump said of California Gov. Gavin Newson, a Democrat, in September. “And unless we give him the money to put out the fires. He has a problem. He’s a terrible governor.”
Newsom countered that Trump had effectively threatened to “block emergency disaster funding to settle political vendettas.”
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“Today it’s wildfires in California. Tomorrow it could be funding hurricanes in North Carolina,” he added.
That’s exactly what happened with the North Carolina hurricane, and President Trump’s focus is not on disaster response aid, but on building a base for his political opponents.
