You can’t predict the weather, but you can predict the politics that accompany major weather events. Good leaders respond promptly to disasters because it’s the humane thing to do and it’s their job. But the cold hard truth is that helping Americans in need also presents a great campaigning opportunity. Rendering relief on a public stage is a winning strategy. No matter the party, optics matter.
But when the effort to boost one’s polling numbers involves suppressing life-saving information and critical relief, it’s clear that American politics have hit a cynical apex.
Just as climate change is contributing to destructive storms with devastating frequency, the Republican Party’s shift to the far right is resulting in another sort of unrelenting, destructive deluge: disaster misinformation.
Hurricane Helene, the second-deadliest hurricane behind Katrina to strike the U.S. mainland in half a century, slammed into the northern gulf coast of Florida last last month, devastating the Southeast all the way up to Virginia. More than 225 people have died, there’s billions of dollars in reported property damage and millions of people are displaced or still without power.
While the Biden administration, various government agencies and concerned citizens of all political persuasions mobilized to help victims of the catastrophe, former President Trump saw Helene as an opportunity to sow confusion ahead of the November election.
Trump falsely claimed that that there were “no helicopters, no rescue” in North Carolina to help those injured and stranded by the Category 4 storm. He lied when he said President Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris stole $1 billion from Federal Emergency Management Agency to spend it on housing for “illegal migrants.”
He purposely mislead those in need when he falsely claimed that the federal government was only giving $750 to people who lost their homes. The slurry of misinformation represents the latest wave of utter BS propagated by the MAGA-verse.
“[The misinformation] is absolutely the worst I have ever seen,” FEMA administrator Deanne Criswell told reporters Tuesday.
She said in another interview with CNN that the former president’s claims that the agency lacks on-the-ground personnel in states hit hardest by Hurricane Helene were “completely false,” and that the federal government has adequate recovery aid available for victims of the storm.
Criswell said she’s concerned the false claims might deter people from getting the help that they need and that they are eligible for in the wake of the catastrophe. And the emergency is far from over.
Another massive storm is predicted to make landfall on the Florida Gulf Coast on Wednesday. Milton developed Monday in the Gulf of Mexico, intensifying from a tropical storm to one of the most powerful hurricanes on record in a short span of time, producing winds of up to 180 miles an hour. Now a Category 5, it could cause up to 15 feet of storm surge, according to the National Hurricane Center.
Biden has urged residents in vulnerable areas, such as Florida’s Tampa Bay, to evacuate. But will they after the politically motivated attacks on the government response to Helene? Eroding the public’s confidence in state and federal authorities can prove as dangerous as high winds in a calamitous situation.
Criswell predicted that Milton will be a “historic” storm. To help combat the concurrent squall of lies, FEMA has spent precious resources to combat the untruths by beefing up the Rumor Response page on its website.
Trump isn’t the only one pedaling fake accusations, and his whoppers aren’t the craziest. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) spun a story worthy of an Austin Power’s Dr. Evil. She suggested that the White House used weather control technology to steer Helene toward regions populated with Republican voters. Their devious goal? To appear heroic as they swooped in to save the day, causing grateful survivors to vote for their leader, Kamala Harris.
Trump’s claim that Biden was refusing to help people in Republican-leaning regions isn’t half as creative. He said that Biden would not help or take calls from governors in hard-hit red states. Yet those same governors begged to differ. Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin stated that he was “deeply appreciative of the rapid response.” Gov. Brian Kemp of Georgia said on that on a call with the president that “[Biden] just said, ‘Hey, what do you need?’ And I told him, you know, ‘We got what we need. We’ll work through the federal process.’ He offered that if there’s other things we need, just to call him directly.”
There’s no evidence Biden withheld support or relief from Republican-leaning states, but a recent report showed that Trump did just that to a blue state back in 2018.
Politico’s E&E News recently published a report revealing that Trump initially refused to approve disaster aid for California after a series of deadly wildfires because of the state’s Democratic leanings. According to a former Trump aide, the then-president was only persuaded to support disaster relief for the state when he was shown that there were more Republican voters in Orange County than in the entire state of Iowa.
The Biden administration’s response to Helene represented one of the largest mobilization of people and resources in recent history. Thousands of National Guardsmen and emergency response personnel helped and are still helping with search-and-rescue and relief efforts. Food, water and millions of dollars in direct funds have been funneled to the region where the death toll continues to rise above 230 people.
There’s a difference between political disasters (such as a bad debate performance) and the politics of disaster. Trump is exploiting the latter, and it’s dangerous.