Trump Decides Hurricane Helene Is Perfect Time to Start New Conspiracy

Hurricane Helene has devastated much of the American Southeast, and yet Donald Trump thinks it’s a good time to push a new conspiracy theory against Democrats.

The former president posted a long message on Truth Social Monday that he was headed to Georgia “to pay my respects and bring lots of relief material, including fuel, equipment, water, and other things, to the State.”

But he added an unproven accusation to the end of that message, claiming that he received reports of “the Federal Government, and the Democrat Governor of [North Carolina], going out of their way to not help people in Republican areas.”

Trump didn’t elaborate on where these “reports” were coming from, which don’t seem to have any factual basis. Much of North Carolina votes Republican, so it would be near impossible for any relief efforts to occur that would neglect conservatives. Roy Cooper, the state’s Democratic governor since 2017, has deployed the National Guard and undertaken statewide efforts to help those affected by the hurricane, which has hit his state hardest, killing nearly 50 people and leaving hundreds of thousands of homes without power.

President Biden has pledged “every available resource, as fast as possible, to your communities, to rescue, recover, and to begin rebuilding,” and even plans to visit communities affected by the hurricane later this week. On Sunday, Biden approved disaster declarations for both Florida and North Carolina, which allows immediate access to emergency funds for recovery efforts.

Trump is clearly attempting to play politics with a natural disaster in a state where Kamala Harris is polling neck and neck with him. It’s a disturbing and familiar move for the former president, who, while in office, sought to withhold federal help from areas where people didn’t support him.

As president, Trump deliberately downplayed the damage from wildfires in Oregon and California, and said he didn’t want “ another single dollar going to [Puerto Rico] ,” even as the U.S. territory struggled to recover from Hurricane Maria. Perhaps he doesn’t think the public remembers how he handled those disasters and thinks projecting his old actions onto Biden, Harris, and the rest of the Democrats is a winning strategy. In any case, it does nothing to help people trying to recover from Hurricane Helene.