Natural disasters, such as the two hurricanes that have slammed into the Southeast in the past couple of weeks, are often politicized, no more so than in a presidential election year.
Incumbents in the White House usually tour the damage, meet with local officials and get the credit for doling out the hundreds of millions of dollars in federal assistance. Amid the human suffering, it presents a great photo-op to have sitting presidents — and their vice presidents — show empathy for the victims.
But natural disasters can also swamp an incumbent administration if the money or other assistance doesn’t arrive quickly enough, or if there are other glitches. That’s when a challenger can use a hurricane or tornado to its advantage, claiming the subpar federal response reflects the incumbent’s incompetence.
Donald Trump is trying to do the latter, but shamefully he has fabricated most everything he has said to make the case that Hurricanes Helene and Milton illustrate why voters should choose him over his Democratic opponent, Vice President Kamala Harris.
Trump lied that President Joe Biden made no effort to contact Georgia’s Republican governor, Brian Kemp, to offer Washington’s assistance after Helene swamped that state.
Trump either lied that federal assistance to hurricane victims was capped at $750, or he was ignorant of how the assistance works. The $750 is just the maximum first initial payout, not the potential total.
And Trump certainly lied when he claimed that the Federal Emergency Management Agency did not have enough money to deal with these disasters because the Biden administration was diverting too much of the agency’s funding to provide housing for illegal immigrants. FEMA, in fact, is spending a bundle on Hurricane Helene victims — almost $350 million as of Wednesday, the agency reported — and is going to do the same for victims of Hurricane Milton.
Where does Trump come up with these falsehoods? Could it be from his own time in office? According to ABC News, back in 2019, the Trump administration did something similar to what the Republican wrongly accused the Biden administration of doing. It used money from FEMA’s disaster fund to pay for detaining and transporting undocumented immigrants at the southern border and for temporary hearing locations for asylum-seekers.
It would be nice if the former president would get his facts straight, but that’s not going to happen. Yet the first inclination of his followers is to believe what Trump says, even though his pathological habit of fabrication should indicate just the opposite. He has normalized lying in politics to such a degree that too many people have lost the ability, or just don’t care, to discern fact from fiction.
