Trump, no stranger to playing storm politics, visits a battered Georgia

Minutes after touching down in storm-ravaged Valdosta, Georgia, former President Donald Trump made an elaborate false claim about the Biden administration’s response to Hurricane Helene.

“The governor’s doing a very good job,” Trump said of Brian Kemp, a Republican. The problem, Trump insisted, was that Kemp was “having a hard time getting the president on the phone.”

Trump, who wore a red “Make America Great Again” cap along with his trademark blue suit and long red tie, added: “I guess, uh, they’re not, they’re not being responsive. The federal government is not being responsive.”

But earlier Monday, Kemp told a different story. He said he and Biden had spoken the night before, and made clear he appreciated the president’s responsiveness.

“He just said, ‘Hey, what do you need?’” Kemp said. “And I told him, you know, we got what we need. We’ll work through the federal process.”

Kemp said Biden offered “that if there’s other things we need, just to call him directly — which, I appreciate that.”

The anecdote from Trump was revealing less for its dishonesty than for what it highlighted about his approach to federal disaster relief. As president, he viewed federal aid through the prism of his personal politics, threatening to withhold money from governors of blue states whom he saw as enemies, and promising “A-plus” treatment for his allies.

The Trump administration proposed cutting the budget of the agency responsible for disaster relief, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, and his top officials diverted money away from FEMA to deal with immigration enforcement. FEMA was understaffed throughout Trump’s presidency and, until the coronavirus pandemic, he did not view the agency as a priority for funding. He instead viewed the Homeland Security Department, which oversees FEMA, solely as an immigration enforcement agency.

After Hurricane Maria struck Puerto Rico in September 2017, Trump told aides he wanted to block money from reaching the island because its leadership was corrupt. He also falsely claimed that Puerto Rican authorities were inflating the hurricane’s death toll.

The most enduring images of Trump’s visiting the island after Maria were of him throwing paper towels at the island’s desperate residents, as if he were shooting free throws. Three years after the hurricane’s landfall, in September 2020, Trump said he would finally release $13 billion worth of aid for Puerto Rico. The announcement came less than two months before Election Day, as the Trump campaign was chasing Puerto Rican voters in Florida in what polls at the time suggested would be a competitive race in the state.

California was another state where the former president’s personal politics collided with the urgent need for federal relief. The 2018 wildfire season was the most destructive in California’s history. Trump — whose presidency the incoming Democratic governor, Gavin Newsom, had positioned himself as a bulwark against — reacted to the disaster by publicly attacking the state and threatening its relief funding.

In January 2019, Trump said he would withhold FEMA support from California if the state did not improve its forest management practices. “Billions of dollars are sent to the State of California for Forest fires that, with proper Forest Management, would never happen,” he wrote on what was then known as Twitter. “Unless they get their act together, which is unlikely, I have ordered FEMA to send no more money. It is a disgraceful situation in lives & money!”

The contentiousness over the fires did not end that season. After a phone call with Newsom in 2020, Trump ended up authorizing federal support for California that had initially been denied by the Trump administration. Newsom publicly thanked Trump for the approval of the money. But this year, Trump has again threatened to withhold disaster relief money from the state.

In comments this past month at his golf course in Rancho Palos Verdes, California, Trump threatened Newsom over a lawsuit the state had filed against Trump-era rules that proposed to send more water to the state’s farmers.

“If he doesn’t sign those papers, we won’t give him money to put out all his fires,” Trump said, referring to Newsom as “Newscum.”

“And, if we don’t give him the money to put out his fires, he’s got problems,” Trump said. “He’s a lousy governor.”

Some former officials said that behind the scenes, and away from cameras, Trump was sympathetic to people who had been affected by national disasters. Thomas Bossert, Trump’s first Homeland Security adviser, said it was reductive to conclude that Trump was blind to what the disaster relief agency did, or unconcerned with how it performed.

“I think it’s unfair,” Bossert said, adding that he believed he had helped Trump think differently about the agency.

“I think President Trump cared about the effects that those storms were having on the people, and maybe you can question his motives, maybe it was their votes or maybe it was their well-being,” he said, but he added that this didn’t change Trump’s behavior with members of the public. He said he thought the federal responses to Hurricane Maria and Hurricane Harvey, which hit Texas and Louisiana in August 2017, had been well managed.

Trump’s visit to south Georgia on Monday comes at a pivotal time in the presidential race, in which the state is important to his reelection prospects. In his remarks, Trump repeatedly said that he had come bearing gifts to help the disaster response: semitrailer trucks filled with relief supplies and a tanker of gas, distributed by the evangelical Christian humanitarian aid group Samaritan’s Purse.

Still, as he underlined his contributions to the storm response, and shortly before he repeated his false claim that Biden had been unreachable by phone, Trump said he would refrain from talking about the politics arching over his visit.

“When a crisis hits, when our fellow citizens cry out in need, none of that matters,” Trump said. “We’re not talking about politics now.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

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