Donald Trump has spent days trying to capitalize politically on Hurricane Helene, which has wrought destruction across six states in the southeast and left at least 200 dead. Not only has he claimed Joe Biden and Kamala Harris have received “POOR GRADES” for the administration’s handling of the storm, despite bipartisan praise for their response (“It has been superb,” South Carolina’s Republican governor, Henry McMaster, said this week). Trump has outright accused the administration of intentionally withholding aid to Republican areas impacted by the storm, even lying at a Thursday rally that Democrats “stole” relief money that should have gone to storm victims and “[gave] it to their illegal immigrants they want to have vote for them this season.”
“Kamala spent all her FEMA money, billions of dollars, on housing for illegal migrants,” he claimed in Saginaw, Michigan Thursday.
That’s not true, of course. Worse yet, Trump himself may have done precisely what he is accusing the Biden administration of, as Politico reported on Thursday. Two former White House officials told the outlet that, as president, Trump was reluctant to provide disaster relief to areas he viewed as favoring Democrats—including California following deadly wildfires in 2018. Mark Harvey, a member of his National Security Council staff who has since endorsed Harris, told Politico that Trump relented and provided the California aid only after he was shown that Orange County “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,” Harvey said, “to show him these are people who voted for you.”
Olivia Troye, another former Trump administration official who backs Harris, confirmed Harvey’s account, and said the episode foreshadowed how Trump would approach disaster relief if elected to another term. The “American voter out there who isn’t even really paying attention to politics, and their house is gone,” Troye told Politico Wednesday, “the president of the United States is judging them for how they voted, and they didn’t even vote.”
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Such a partisan response would constitute a grave abuse of power, but perhaps not a surprising one. He all but acknowledged his disregard for Democratic-leaning areas during his response to the COVID pandemic back in 2020. The death toll, he said in September of that year, isn’t so bad “if you take the blue states out”: “We’re really at a very low level,” he boasted at the time.
Now, Trump is seeking to exploit Helene—which devastated North Carolina and Georgia, two battlegrounds in this fall’s election—to his political benefit, seeking to portray his opponent as partisan and incorporating it into his ugly attacks on immigrants, with help from right-wing figures like Elon Musk, who have amplified the baseless claims. Even Republican governors in the affected states of Tennessee, South Carolina, Virginia, and Georgia have contradicted Trump, praising the administration’s response. “He just said, ‘Hey, what do you need?’” Georgia Governor Brian Kemp, who will appear with Trump Friday for the first time since 2020, said of his call with Biden this week, despite Trump’s claim that he couldn’t get in touch with the administration. “And I told him, you know, we’ve got what we need, we will work through the federal process.” But that hasn’t stopped the wild claims, with one Trump ally, Marjorie Taylor Greene, even suggesting Democrats had literally manufactured the storm to destroy Republican-leaning areas. “Yes they can control the weather,” Greene posted on X Thursday night. “It’s ridiculous for anyone to lie and say it can’t be done.”
