Trump Drags Hurricane Helene Into the Election Campaign

As the government rolls out assistance to the hundreds of thousands affected by Hurricane Helene over the weekend, the Republican campaign appears engaged in a slightly different kind of damage control.

The Trump camp has scheduled a Monday pit-stop for the Republican candidate in Valdosta, Georgia —a key battleground state, where at least 17 people are reported to have died—after his suggestion at a Walker, Michigan rally that hurricane victims will “be OK” sparked outcry on Friday.

He’s expected to receive a briefing on the extent of the devastation and to assist with the distribution of relief, as well as taking the opportunity to “deliver remarks to the press,” according to an emailed statement from his team.

While Republican supporters have criticized the Harris campaign for taking Trump’s Friday statement out of context, it also comes after he spoke in candidly politicized terms about the disaster at another rally in Erie, Pennsylvania on Sunday.

“Biden is in Delaware right now in one of his many estates… Lyin’ Kamala Harris [is] in San Francisco, a city that she has totally destroyed,” he told the crowds. “That’s where she is right now… at fundraising events with her radical left lunatic donors, when big parts of our country have been devastated by that massive hurricane and are underwater, with many, many people dead.”

Harris and Biden have issued statements expressing their condolences to those affected by the disaster, with the White House confirming both the president and vice-president will visit “impacted communities” later this week just “as soon as it will not disrupt emergency response operations,” Politico reports.

Harris has also cancelled Monday's campaign stops to return to Washington, where she's scheduled to receive a briefing on the status of emergency response and recovery efforts, the White House has said.

Meanwhile, Democrat supporters have seized on Trump’s politicization of the storm, which is reported to have killed more than a hundred people, to level criticism against the Republican candidate for his historic denial of climate change, a known driver of extreme weather events.

Others have noted that Project 2025 —the far-right Heritage Foundation’s blueprint for an incoming Republican administration, which Trump himself has said would lay the “ groundwork ” for his second presidency—in fact contains proposals to slash funding for hurricane monitoring and relief agencies.

Officials in the some of the worst-affected areas, however, have lashed out at what they perceive as attempts from both sides of the divide to use the crisis as a means of securing political capital.

“The people in my district really don’t want to see politicians,” Chuck Edwards, Republican representative for North Carolina, told Politico . “They want to see water. Cell towers and power restored, and the ability to contact their loved ones. Photo ops are not what’s needed.”

The state’s Democrat governor, Roy Cooper, offered a similar take. “I told the president that we did not elected officials that require a lot of security and attention, because we need to make sure that we’re getting the work done on the ground,” he said. “It’s not the right time for them to come.”

Read more at The Daily Beast.