It takes an awful lot for congressional Republicans to express dissatisfaction with Donald Trump and his team, but the president’s administration has been so slow in approving disaster declarations that even GOP lawmakers aligned with the White House are sick of it.
Trump published an item to his social media platform on Wednesday afternoon, announcing that he’d personally approved $2.5 million in disaster aid for Missouri. Ordinarily, that wouldn’t have been especially notable as a national news story, but the context matters.
The president’s online statement didn’t just announce the relief funding, it also emphasized the number of times he won Missouri’s electoral votes, as if there were some kind of connection between his political support in the state and his eagerness to provide disaster aid. The Republican went on to reference the “incredible Patriots” in the GOP stronghold.
Just one minute later, Trump published a follow-up item, touting his approval of $15 million for Nebraska. The minute after that, he added a third missive, announcing $25 million for Alaska — “which I won BIG in 2016, 2020, and 2024,” he wrote.
The president’s apparent eagerness to draw overt and direct connections between disaster relief funds and political considerations was ridiculous, but it was only part of a larger problem. The Associated Press reported:
President Donald Trump approved major disaster declarations for Alaska, Nebraska, North Dakota and the Leech Lake Band of Ojibwe late Wednesday, while denying requests from Vermont, Illinois and Maryland and leaving other states still waiting for answers. … The disaster declarations authorize the Federal Emergency Management Agency to support recipients with federal financial assistance to repair public infrastructure damaged by disasters and, in some cases, provide survivors money for repairs and temporary housing.
The AP’s report added that the White House denied four requests, “including Maryland’s appeal for reconsideration after the state was denied a disaster declaration for May flooding that severely impacted the state’s two westernmost counties.”
Trump lost Maryland by 29 points last fall.
The state’s Democratic governor, Wes Moore, described the denial as “deeply frustrating,” adding in a written statement that “President Trump and his administration have politicized disaster relief, and our communities are the ones who will pay the price.” Around the same time, Trump also denied a major disaster declaration for Vermont — a state he lost by 31 points — which suffered significant flooding damage in July. It would be easier to see this as a coincidence if the Republican administration had been otherwise evenhanded in dealing with red and blue states, but given the obvious fact that it has not, it makes these latest decisions even more difficult to defend. “Trump seems to see Democratic-led states — and the people in them — less as constituents to which he has a set of larger obligations and more as enemies to be pacified and defeated,” The New York Times’ Jamelle Bouie recently argued. “For Trump, there is no whole people of the United States. There are only his people and his states.”
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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