As this week got underway, Donald Trump traveled to Georgia, ostensibly to survey Hurricane Helene damage, where the former president told a series of bizarre lies. The Republican said Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp hadn’t been able to reach President Joe Biden, which wasn’t true. He said the Biden administration and North Carolina’s Democratic governor were “going out of their way to not help people in Republican areas,” which was insane.
Trump also accused Vice President Kamala Harris of staging a photograph of her talking on the phone with FEMA officials, told reporters that “nobody” could have predicted Hurricane Helene, and insisted that it’s “late in the season for the hurricanes.” All of these claims were completely false.
Three days later, the GOP candidate started peddling a new and related falsehood, claiming at a campaign rally that the White House lacks the resources needed to address Helene’s aftermath because “they spent it all on illegal migrants.” Trump added that as far as he was concerned, Biden administration officials “stole” FEMA money as part of an elaborate conspiracy to get undocumented immigrants — who can’t vote — to support Democratic candidates.
Ruhle: Donald Trump's claim that the government is not helping hurricane survivors is absolutely, categorically false.. Even his running mate knows it. Here’s what he said pic.twitter.com/i2fzzUNeQt
— Acyn (@Acyn) October 4, 2024
The former president’s claims were, of course, ugly and indefensible lies. But they also helped open the door to a related conversation, which the Republican nominee would probably prefer to avoid.
In fact, as Trump lies about the Biden administration politicizing federal disaster aid, there’s fresh evidence to suggest it was Trump who actually did what he’s falsely accused Democrats of doing. Politico reported:
[A] review of Trump’s record by POLITICO’s E&E News and interviews with two former Trump White House officials show that the former president was flagrantly partisan at times in response to disasters and on at least three occasions hesitated to give disaster aid to areas he considered politically hostile or ordered special treatment for pro-Trump states.”
While the reporting hasn’t been independently verified by MSNBC or NBC News, one former official — Mark Harvey, who was Trump’s senior director for resilience policy on the National Security Council staff — went on the record, noting that the former president, while in office, “initially refused to approve disaster aid for California after deadly wildfires in 2018 because of the state’s Democratic leanings.”
Harvey was able to change his mind, not by appealing to the then-president’s sense of decency or compassion, but by noting that there was extensive damage in Orange County, California — where there were many Trump voters.
“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 told Politico.
As the report highlighted related incidents, Harvey went on to shed light on Trump’s twisted perspective. “It just goes into this pattern of, ‘We’re not awarding that, these aren’t my people.’ That general sense of, ‘I am here to help my people, and these aren’t my people, so I don’t have a responsibility to help,’” he added.
Biden highlighted the Politico report via social media and told his nearly 39 million followers, “You can’t only help those in need if they voted for you. It’s the most basic part of being president, and this guy knows nothing about it.” That’s true, though there’s no reason to stop there. If these allegations are true, I’d argue that they also constitute the kind of governmental abuse that would almost certainly warrant impeachment. What’s more, they offer a timely warning to American voters about the kind of antics they should expect if Trump is returned to power. Olivia Troye, a former Trump White House homeland security adviser, was explicit on this point, telling Politico that if the former president prevails, he’ll view disasters through a political lens that values personal loyalty over damage considerations. “It’s not going to be about that American voter out there who isn’t even really paying attention to politics, and their house is gone, and the president of the United States is judging them for how they voted, and they didn’t even vote,” Troye concluded.
Steve Benen is a producer for "The Rachel Maddow Show," the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He's also the bestselling author of "Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans' War on the Recent Past."
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