WASHINGTON — Donald Trump, who as president withheld hurricane aid to Puerto Rico and threatened to withhold wildfire assistance to California, on Monday falsely accused President Joe Biden of failing to help Hurricane Helene’s flood victims in western North Carolina and Georgia, having “left Americans to drown” in the South.
“He’s been calling the president, he hasn’t been able to get him,” Trump said of Georgia’s governor, fellow Republican Brian Kemp, in his remarks to reporters in Valdosta, a city in the southern part of the state.
It was a lie — refuted by Kemp himself earlier that day.
“The president just called me yesterday afternoon. I missed him and I called him right back,” Kemp told reporters. “And he just said, ‘Hey, what do you need?’”
That falsehood was the latest in a string of lies Trump has issued about the response by Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris, the Democratic nominee for president, to the Category 4 storm that came ashore late Thursday.
Just before flying to Valdosta, the coup-attempting former president posted on social media about western North Carolina: “I’ll be there shortly, but don’t like the reports that I’m getting about the Federal Government, and the Democrat Governor of the State, going out of their way to not help people in Republican areas. MAGA!”
He then posted an even more inflammatory claim, again with zero evidence of malfeasance: “They have left Americans to drown in North Carolina, Georgia, Tennessee, Alabama, and elsewhere in the South.”
And at the Valdosta Regional Airport, asked by a reporter if he had contacted Biden about the response, Trump, wearing his red campaign MAGA hat, answered, “No, I haven’t reached out to him. I think he’s sleeping right now, actually.”
In fact, Biden had just minutes earlier detailed to reporters at the White House his administration’s actions to date and planned next steps. He also explained that he intends to visit the worst-hit areas in North Carolina, but not until later in the week so as not to get in the way of operations on the ground with his large traveling entourage and security detail. “This can be disruptive,” he said.
Trump, as he was leaving Valdosta, was confronted by a reporter about whether he had any evidence that assistance was being withheld from Republican areas. Trump did not provide any. “Just take a look,” he said.
The accusations, which have been amplified in right-wing, pro-Trump media, appear to have been invented out of whole cloth.
While residents of northern Georgia, the western Carolinas and eastern Tennessee may have been surprised by the amount of rainfall they received that sparked the rapid flooding, Biden’s Federal Emergency Management Agency and National Hurricane Center forecasters had warned about that danger back when Helene was still in the Gulf of Mexico.
FEMA administrator Deanne Criswell, at a White House briefing on Thursday, said residents of states in the southern Appalachians needed to pay attention.
“Georgia, South Carolina, North Carolina, and those Appalachians, they’re going to have up to 20 inches of rain in an area that can have significant flash flooding. And that is really life-threatening, and it comes so much faster than what we see from a storm surge,” she said. “They’re going to have less warning once the rain starts there, so they need to know what they’re going to do now, put those plans … in place today for where they’re going to go, how they’re going to contact their family and their friends, what they’re going to need to take with them ― like medicine or power devices for medical reasons.”
Hours later, in their 5 p.m. advisory, National Hurricane Center forecasters also warned of the threats to areas north of Helene’s expected landfall in Florida’s Big Bend.
“Catastrophic and life-threatening flash and urban flooding, including numerous significant landslides, is expected across portions of the southern Appalachians through Friday,” the forecast stated. “Considerable to locally catastrophic flash and urban flooding is likely for northwestern and northern Florida and the Southeast through Friday. Widespread significant river flooding and isolated major river flooding are likely.”
In anticipation of this, Criswell said that FEMA Incident Management Assistance Teams had already been deployed to Georgia and Alabama in addition to Florida, and that one was en route to North Carolina as well. Further, Biden had already approved pre-landfall emergency declarations for Florida, Georgia and North Carolina to help get funding for response started.
Trump, during his 13-minute speech in Valdosta, did not take questions. He did, however, betray a continuing ignorance about hurricanes and hurricane season, despite his four years in office.
He said that no one had ever seen a storm as large and powerful as Helene, and that it was especially surprising because “it’s so late in the season for the hurricanes.”
In fact, hurricane season for the North Atlantic Ocean basin starts on June 1 and ends on Nov. 30, with August, September and October being the peak months. What’s more, there have been a great many storms larger and more powerful than Helene over the years.
Trump’s accusations that Biden is intentionally withholding assistance from areas where residents are largely critical of him, however, do mirror his precise behavior as president when he withheld $20 billion in congressionally approved aid to Puerto Rico following Hurricane Maria in 2017 and threatened to withhold federal assistance to California to deal with wildfires.
The question of federal assistance in the event of natural disasters may become moot should Trump win back the White House. Under the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 — which Trump initially praised for detailing “exactly what our movement will do” if he returned to office but in recent months has disavowed as Democrats publicized its contents — federal programs helping individuals and businesses would be slashed. The massive proposal also would scrap the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, as well as turn over forecasting, and presumably control, over a fleet of weather satellites paid for with many billions of tax dollars to private companies.
