Wait A Minute, You're Telling Us *Donald Trump* Politicized *Natural Disasters*???
Helene? I never met her, she wouldn't be the chosen one.
We have some good news for you this morning! As far as we can tell, Donald Trump hasn’t said anything insanely full of lies about the federal disaster response to Hurricane Helene lately, preferring instead to complain about the recently unsealed indictment against him. (Then again, we are writing this Thursday afternoon, so you never know).* On Thursday morning, he went on his fake Twitter and lazily lied,
Kamala and Sleepy Joe are universally being given POOR GRADES for the way that they are handling the Hurricane, especially in North Carolina. It is going down as the WORST & MOST INCOMPETENTLY MANAGED “STORM,” AT THE FEDERAL LEVEL, EVER SEEN BEFORE - BUT THEIR MANAGEMENT OF THE BORDER IS WORSE! MAGA2024
Heck, that’s just bog-standard Trump, just lying that everyone is giving the administration “low grades.” It’s callous and disgusting, but not nearly as bad as the dangerous lies he told earlier in the week, when the floodwaters had barely passed. Among other lies, he claimed that Biden and North Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper, a Democrat, were deliberately withholding help from “Republican areas” and that Republican governors who in fact had already had their emergency requests approved were “having a very hard time getting the, getting the president on the phone.” That was much more like shouting “shark!” on a crowded electric boat.
* UPDATE: Aaand of course Trump then went on to lie about Helene aid at a rally in Michigan Thursday evening, conflating an entirely different FEMA grant program — which would not have covered anything close to the damage from Helene — with FEMA’s disaster aid funding. Trump even managed to cram two lies into a single wordblurt, claiming that the Biden administration “stole the FEMA money like they stole it from a bank so they could give it to their illegal immigrants that they want to have vote for them this season.”
Lie 1: No funds were diverted from emergency aid, as we explained. Lie 2: Undocumented immigrants can’t vote, and do not. It’s a felony! Now, back to the thing I already wrote!
As we noted the other day, while Trump’s Marching Morons will always drool and agree with whatever madness he’s saying, his flagrant lies about the federal response to Helene may be more likely to remind normal people of his own penchant for using disaster aid to reward his political friends and hurt his enemies.
The worst example was his awful mismanagement of aid to Puerto Rico — where they didn’t even vote for him! — after Hurricane Maria in 2017. In the first few days after Maria, Trump largely ignored the disaster because he was too busy complaining on Twitter about football players protesting racism — two tweets about Puerto Rico, 17 about football. Once he did get around to paying attention, he threw paper towels at Puerto Ricans while reminding them how expensive the disaster was. From there, Trump alternated between bragging about the great job he was doing, and complaining that the mayor of San Juan didn’t appreciate his kindness. After Congress finally passed funding for recovery and reconstruction in 2019, Trump deliberately slow-walked releasing it, insisting Puerto Rico couldn’t be trusted. Much of the funding only got to the territory after Joe Biden took office.
But there was so much more than just Puerto Rico. Almost any disaster in a blue state became fodder for a political tantrum. Or even a purple state. Following Hurricane Matthew in 2017, Gov. Cooper requested $929 million in recovery assistance for North Carolina, but Trump denied 99 percent of it. Why yes, that’s the same North Carolina Trump lied about this week, in case you’ve come unstuck in time.
And of course there’s California, which Trump only reluctantly admits is part of the USA. Trump infamously complained that wildfires there have less to do with climate change and drought than with an imaginary failure to rake the forests like they do in Sweden. That was following the deadly 2018 fire that killed 84 people and largely destroyed the town of Paradise, which Trump mistakenly called “Pleasure” after surveying the damage.
Trump repeatedly threatened to withhold aid to California because he thought the state needed to “clean up their forests,” and also blamed the fires on imaginary environmentalists who wouldn’t let the state dam every river and keep all the water from getting to the ocean, where it would just be wasted. Firefighters, of course, had access to water to fight the fires; the problem was drought, exacerbated by global warming. But Trump doesn’t think that’s real.
In new reporting published just yesterday, E&E News revealed even more disaster fuckery by Trump, reporting that during his presidency, Trump “on at least three occasions hesitated to give disaster aid to areas he considered politically hostile or ordered special treatment for pro-Trump states.” Partisan handling of a disaster? Maybe a little!
In an interview, Mark Harvey, who served as Trump’s “senior director for resilience policy on the National Security Council staff” — one of those people in the room who Trump wouldn’t remember, you know — explained that Trump initially didn’t want to approve any disaster aid for the 2018 wildfires because, well, it’s only Democrats in that state.
But Harvey said Trump changed his mind after Harvey pulled voting results to show him that heavily damaged Orange County, California, had more Trump supporters than the entire state of Iowa.
“We went as far as looking up how many votes he got in those impacted areas … to show him these are people who voted for you,” said Harvey, who recently endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris alongside more than 100 other Republican former national security officials.
Harvey also said that following disasters, he noticed that Trump never bothered having any “empathy for the survivors. It is all about getting your photo-op, right? Disaster theater to make him look good.”
And yes, there’s more. Olivia Troye, a former adviser on homeland security who was often involved in disaster response,
said local political leaders regularly called her office begging for help because Trump refused to sign documents approving aid. Troye said she had to repeatedly enlist former Vice President Mike Pence to apply pressure.
Ah, but for states that voted bigly for Trump, he was happy to increase the available aid, regularly boosting disaster costs for Florida when Ron DeSantis reminded him that hard-hit parts of the state were “Trump country,” according to DeSantis’s campaign biography that nobody bothered reading until now.
“They love me in the Panhandle,” Trump replied, according to DeSantis’ book, published in 2023 as he was preparing to run for president. “I must have won 90 percent of the vote out there. Huge crowds. What do they need?”
Yup, that sounds like Trump all right.
On Twitter Thursday, President Biden posted a link to the E&E News story and added, “You can’t only help those in need if they voted for you. It’s the most basic part of being president, and this guy knows nothing about it.”
Visiting Georgia to see storm damage and meet with local leaders, Biden said, “In moments like this, it’s time to put politics aside. It’s not one state versus another — it’s the United States.” What a commie!
Trump campaign spokestroll Steven Cheung denied the E&E News reporting, insisting, “None of this is true and is nothing more than a fabricated story from someone’s demented imagination,” and then he slid back into his oily lair with a damp sucking sound, the end.
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Updated with the inevitable correction to "trump hasn't lied outrageously lately" in the lede
[...he claimed that Biden and North Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper, a Democrat, were deliberately withholding help from “Republican areas” ...]
Every accusation is a confession.