Trump’s Politicization of Hurricane Helene Is Scandalous, Even for Him

Trump descends on South Georgia to politicize disaster relief and recovery. Photo: Michael M. Santiago/Getty Images

Government response to disasters will inevitably produce some political fallout, if only because they represent occasions when people urgently need competent and expeditious assistance and public entities vary in how well they meet those needs. It’s well established, for example, that the Obama administration’s response to “Superstorm” Sandy in October of 2012 gave that 44th president a pre-election lift, and that the George W. Bush administration’s perceived failures in responding to Hurricane Katrina in 2005 help send the 43d president’s job approval ratings into a tail spin from which they never recovered.

You can’t take the politics out of politics. But by and large criticism of those engaged in disaster response and recovery doesn’t extend to those down in the trenches — or in the deep mud and the horrific debris — who are struggling to help people survive and recover in the immediate wake of an event like Hurricane Helene. And even when responsible authorities clearly screw up, there’s a residual tradition of non-partisanship that usually delays fault-finding and score-settling until people are out of harm’s way.

The tradition is being egregiously trashed by Donald Trump and his surrogates.

The former president has been alleging without evidence a highly incompetent and even indifferent Biden administration response. As CNN reports, it’s mostly a pack of demonstrably fabricated lies:

Though the Biden administration’s response had certainly received criticism, it had also been praised by various state and local leaders — including the Republican governors of some of the affected states and the Democratic governor of North Carolina, plus local leaders including the Democratic mayor of the hard-hit North Carolina city of Asheville.

For example, Republican South Carolina Gov. Henry McMaster said at a Tuesday press conference that federal assistance had “been superb,” noting that Biden and Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg had both called and told him to let them know whatever the state needed. McMaster also said FEMA Administrator Deanne Criswell had called.

Worse yet, MAGA folk are circulating all sort of destructive rumors — so many that FEMA has set up a special site called “Hurricane Helene: Rumor Response.” One of the big myths the feds are having to knock down is being promoted by Elon Musk involving alleged FAA interference with private relief operations:

Fact: The FAA is not restricting access for recovery operations. The FAA is coordinating closely with state and local officials to make sure everyone is operating safely in very crowded and congested airspace.

Musk, you may not be surprised to learn, has a pre-existing beef with the FAA involving his SpaceX company, so it appears he’s picking up a rock and throwing it at the agency in the guise of compassion for Helene victims. But it also reinforces his buddy Trump’s disinformation about the Biden administration’s efforts.

The most predictable if outrageous Trump claim basically just tosses FEMA and disaster relief into the template of the former president’s hallucinatory narrative of a Biden administration frantic to mobilize “illegal aliens” to go vote and rob Trump of another hard-earned election victory. FEMA doesn’t have the resources to do its job, he says, because Joe and Kamala have forced the agency to spend all its money on the murderers and rapists being pulled into the United States across an “open border,” as NBC News reports:

False claims that federal emergency disaster money was given to migrants in the U.S. illegally have spread quickly in recent days, boosted by former President Donald Trump and some of his most high-profile supporters. Trump repeated one of the more extreme baseless allegations during a rally Thursday in Saginaw, Michigan, saying that the money had been stolen. 

“They stole the FEMA money, just 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,” Trump said.

This is a very deliberate lie. FEMA disaster money cannot be used for other purposes, but Congress appropriated a separate and relatively small fund of money to FEMA in 2022 to help local governments cope with migrant relocations. The only recent effort to actually divert disaster money to immigration-related needs was by the Trump administration, as the Washington Post reminds:

In 2019, the Trump administration, in the middle of hurricane season, told Congress that it was taking $271 million from DHS programs, including $155 million from the disaster fund, to pay for immigration detention space and temporary hearing locations for asylum seekers who had been forced to wait in Mexico. “The U.S. is facing a security and humanitarian crisis on the Southern border,” the administration said in its notice that it was redirecting the funds.

Combine all the fables Team Trump is promoting right now and they tell a tall tale of worthless deep-state bureaucrats (whom Trump wants to replace with loyalists once he’s back in office) politically persecuting his suffering followers (just like the Biden administration persecuted him via “lawfare”), as they pursue their horrifically anti-American project of drowning the country and its voters in a sea of violent pet-eating migrants deeper than any flood waters. Needless to say this campaign of slander offers Helene victims nothing other than another grievance and makes an ongoing tragedy just another chapter in the saga of Trump’s earth-scorching return to power.