Trump Refused to Approve Wildfire Aid Until He Learned Affected Areas Were MAGA: Report
As the death toll from Hurricane Helene surpasses 200 people and the Southeast continues to reel from the disaster, Donald Trump is working overtime to politicize the tragedy into an attack against his opponent, Vice President Kamala Harris.
Despite governors from both political parties lauding of the Biden administration’s response, Trump is insisting the federal government has abandoned affected communities.
Earlier this week, Trump baselessly claimed that “the Federal Government, and the Democrat Governor of [North Carolina are] going out of their way to not help people in Republican areas,” ahead of a visit to a disaster zone in Valdosta, Georgia. But for all of the former president’s posturing as a capable leader who would better handle the crisis, his record in the White House says otherwise.
According to a Thursday report from E&E News, in 2018 — as wildfires ravaged large swaths of California — Trump initially refused to approve aid to the state because he felt some of the affected regions didn’t like him enough.
Mark Harvey, then Trump’s senior director for resilience policy on the National Security Council staff, told E&E News, a subset of Politico, that the former president only approved the aid after being shown data proving that the affected counties contained a sufficient amount of his supporters.
“We went as far as looking up how many votes he got in those impacted areas … to show him these are people who voted for you,” Harvey recalled. His account was backed up by former Trump White House Homeland Security Adviser Olivia Troy.
It’s not the only time Trump based his response to a national disaster on the politics of those caught in its wake. A 2021 report found that the Trump administration blocked nearly $20 billion in hurricane relief to Puerto Rico in the aftermath of 2017’s Hurricane Maria, which devastated the island. Trump publicly bashed San Juan’s mayor at the time — Carmen Yulín Cruz, who had been critical of Trump — as “incompetent,” and downplayed the severity of the storm that killed nearly 3,000 people.
Last year, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis in his memoir described speaking to Trump in 2019 after Hurricane Michael swept through northern Florida. DeSantis requested that Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) foot the entire bill for recovery efforts instead of the standard 75 percent.
“This is Trump country — and they need your help,” DeSantis pitched Trump.
“They love me in the panhandle,” the former president said. “I must have won 90 percent of the vote out there. Huge crowds. What do they need?” Shortly after the conversation took place, Trump signed an executive order commanding the federal government to cover “100 percent of the total eligible costs” related to the hurricane response.
According to an analysis by E&E news, the decision resulted in FEMA paying “roughly $350 million more than it would have without Trump’s intervention.”
Trump’s impulse to make his responsibilities to Americans contingent on their politics has not vanished since he left office. Shortly before he took it upon himself to politicize the response to Helene, he threatened to withhold aid for natural disasters from Democratic strongholds.
“We won’t give him money to put out all his fires,” Trump said of California Gov. Gavin Newson, a Democrat, in September. “And, if we don’t give him the money to put out his fires. He’s got problems. He’s a lousy governor.”
Newsom countered that Trump had effectively threatened to “block emergency disaster funds to settle political vendettas.”
“Today it’s California’s wildfires. Tomorrow it could be hurricane funding for North Carolina,” he added.
A hurricane in North Carolina is exactly what happened, and Trump’s focus has not been on aiding the disaster response, but on basing his political rivals.
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