Trump thrusts hurricane response into center of 2024 campaign

As many across the southeast struggle to dig out from Hurricane Helene and with Florida now bracing for Hurricane Milton, Donald Trump is making the storms a flashpoint in the presidential race.

The former president has seized on the devastation left by Helene to launch a barrage of misinformation — including promoting false claims that FEMA spent disaster relief money on migrants that add to his already inflammatory rhetoric about immigration. Across visits to storm-torn states and through social media, he has cast Kamala Harris and the Biden administration as absent and incompetent in delivering aid even as members of his own party in affected areas say otherwise.

Harris is in a trickier position as both a candidate and a vice president who is involved in — but not the face of — the federal response to the storms. On the official side, the vice president has traveled to two hard-hit states in the last week, meeting with federal emergency officials and volunteers in a bid to demonstrate her close involvement in the government response.

But Harris and her campaign haven’t avoided getting involved in the politics of disaster response. Her campaign has attacked Trump repeatedly on social media , featuring clips from his rallies where he talks about Helene or mocks Democrats’ rhetoric on climate change. It has also highlighted a clip from Ken Cuccinelli — a former senior Trump homeland security official and Project 2025 contributor, a favorite punching bag of the campaign that Trump has disavowed — talking about shrinking FEMA , warning that “their plan is to cut assistance for hurricane victims.”

Now, as Trump continues to perpetuate misleading claims in the face of another storm, Harris has begun tearing into the former president in interviews for amplifying misinformation and her campaign has launched a new advertisement criticizing him for politicizing federal aid efforts while he was in the White House. And she has become embroiled in a war of words with Republican Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis over government preparations for Milton from which neither politician is likely to emerge a winner.

Amid the political storm is a crisis that federal, state and local officials are struggling to surmount, with especially difficult recoveries facing parts of North Carolina, where dozens are still missing and some communities still lack power, cell phone service and basic supplies . Perilous floods and landslides left homes in ruins, and the death toll across the southeast has reached 232. Milton, which is spiraling ever closer to Florida, will only add to the damage.

“We’re a month out from an election, politics are always going to be a part of it,” said Doug Heye, a Republican strategist with deep ties to North Carolina. “But people who are pushing a political agenda in these instances are not helping their own voters.”

This campaign is not the first to be upended by hurricanes in the home stretch. FEMA’s disorganized and chaotic relief efforts following Hurricane Andrew in 1992 proved politically costly to then-President George H.W. Bush. Superstorm Sandy’s destructive tear through the Eastern Seaboard in late October of 2012 allowed then-President Barack Obama to project leadership — and relegated his Republican opponent, Mitt Romney, to the sidelines.

“It really sucked the air right out of the room,” Ryan Williams, a Republican strategist who worked on Romney’s 2012 campaign, recalled on Tuesday.

And, Williams cautioned, “it’s not helpful to try to politicize a storm. Just focus on doing what you can to help victims. If you’re not president or the governor of Florida, it’s best to focus on charity work and staying out of the way of the official response.”

But in a tight race playing out in a hyper-partisan political climate, where the devastation is stretching across swing states, that’s easier said than done.

Trump has a history of peddling misinformation about natural disasters, including the time, as president, he infamously used a Sharpie to modify a forecast map for Hurricane Dorian to incorrectly suggest the storm would impact Alabama. And that habit is again on display.

In the days after Helene tore through the southeast — including areas of North Carolina and Georgia that are largely Republican — Trump falsely said President Joe Biden had not picked up calls from GOP Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp. He promoted unsubstantiated claims that the federal government and North Carolina’s Democratic governor, Roy Cooper, were intentionally withholding aid from Republican areas of the state. He has misleadingly said FEMA is only offering hurricane victims $750 in aid. And he has amplified several other falsehoods about the disaster-relief agency diverting its funding to help house undocumented immigrants — claims that mischaracterize how the program through which FEMA metes out money to state and local governments providing shelter and services to migrants is funded.

Federal and state officials have debunked Trump’s claims. So, too — and, perhaps more politically perilously for Trump — have members of his own party, who have largely praised the government’s efforts post-Helene and have publicly pushed back on the Republican nominee’s rhetoric. Rep. Chuck Edwards, a Republican who represents a portion of western North Carolina that includes Asheville, for instance, posted a lengthy fact check on his website on Tuesday.

The Trump campaign has launched an authorized GoFundMe page that raised roughly $7 million and has teamed up with the Christian charity Samaritan's Purse to provide supplies.

But Trump is not letting up on his rhetoric. With Hurricane Milton spinning toward Florida and Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate, the former president — who is not riding out the storm in Palm Beach — said in an interview with conservative radio host Ben Shapiro on Tuesday that when he visited North Carolina, people told him there was “no FEMA” and requested that he call prominent backer Elon Musk to provide Starlink, his satellite internet service, to help people communicate.

“Already this is going to be a big one. They’re in trouble with Helene in North Carolina and other places and now you look at this one coming in,” Trump said.

“The woman,” he said, referring to Harris, “doesn’t know what she’s doing.”

His campaign spokesperson, Karoline Leavitt, said in a statement: “The only misinformation is coming from the Biden-Harris Administration” and that “according to residents on the ground, the federal government’s response has, in fact, been a disaster.”

Biden and his aides have dismissed the Trump campaign’s criticism of the response, pointing to the public assurances made by both Democratic and Republican governors that the administration has provided them with everything they’ve asked for.

The White House’s decision to prioritize pushing back on misinformation around the hurricane was driven in part by requests from governors and local politicians for help combating the falsehoods, aides said, with press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre emphasizing on Monday that “elected officials at every level and on both sides of the aisle” had called for an end to the conspiracy theories.

In press conferences and television interviews, officials at both FEMA and the White House have devoted the last several days to correcting the falsehoods and criticizing those who have amplified them. With Milton looming, officials say they fear the social media conspiracies could spiral out of control, especially if they are again fanned by Trump and other prominent conservative figures, like Musk.

“If past is prologue, it’s real,” Biden said on Tuesday about misinformation in the aftermath of Milton, accusing those spreading it of trying “to damage the administration” and calling them “unAmerican.” FEMA officials, meanwhile, said Tuesday that the swirl of misinformation is discouraging to first responders and worried it could dissuade people in affected areas from seeking help.

Harris has made two trips to areas hit by the hurricane in recent days, cutting short a campaign bus tour last week to visit Georgia and later traveling to North Carolina. Harris during the North Carolina stop praised local officials for their response efforts and visited a volunteer center on the ground.

She did not address Trump at the time. But since then, Harris has taken aim repeatedly at her rival over his attempts to sow doubt about the response. The vice president’s campaign launched a new ad across swing states that features former Trump administration officials slamming the Republican nominee for hesitating to provide disaster relief to Democratic areas while president. And Harris, in a series of pre-scheduled interviews on Tuesday, slammed Trump’s perpetuating of misinformation as callous and the “height of irresponsibility.”

“The idea that somebody would be playing political games for the sake of himself — but this is so consistent about Donald Trump,” Harris said on “The View.” “He puts himself before the needs of others. I fear that he really lacks empathy, on a very basic level, to care about the suffering of other people.”

Kimberly Leonard and Meridith McGraw contributed to this report.