Kamala Harris had harsh words for Governor Ron DeSantis, after the Republican dodged her calls ahead of Hurricane Milton’s landfall in Florida.
As Milton intensified Monday into a Category 5 storm over the Gulf of Mexico, DeSantis decided not to respond to offers for emergency assistance from the vice president because her calls “seemed political,” according to one of his aides.
Harris was asked later that day about DeSantis’s reported refusal to take her calls outside of Joint Base Andrews in Maryland.
“People are in desperate need of support right now,” Harris said. “And playing political games at this moment, in these crisis situations—these are the height of emergency situations—it’s utterly irresponsible, and it is selfish, and it is about political gamesmanship instead of doing the job that you took an oath to do, which is to put the people first.”
DeSantis responded to Harris’s comment during an interview on Fox News Monday night.
“For Kamala Harris to try to say that my sole focus on the people of Florida is somehow selfish, is delusional,” DeSantis said. “She has no role in this. In fact, she’s been vice president for three and a half years. I’ve dealt with a number of storms under this administration. She has never contributed anything to any of these efforts, and so what I think is selfish is her trying to blunder into this.”
DeSantis said he was already in contact with President Joe Biden and FEMA director Deanne Criswell, and noted that he’d worked well with Biden and former President Donald Trump to manage weather emergencies, but that Harris was “the first one who’s trying to politicize the storm.”
“I don’t have time for these political games,” DeSantis said.
Surely, DeSantis must be thinking of an entirely different Trump, because the Republican presidential nominee has done more than his fair share of politicizing natural disasters in the last two weeks.
In the wake of Hurricane Helene, Trump baselessly claimed that the Biden administration had failed to contact Republican officials, and had prevented aid from reaching Republican areas.
He has repeatedly claimed that there have been no federal rescue efforts in western North Carolina, where the flooding and damage is most severe. His lies have then been parroted by Republican lawmakers and conservative pundits, spreading rampant misinformation about federal and state relief efforts as part of his crusade to smear the Biden-Harris administration ahead of the election.
And this kind of dangerous partisanship isn’t new for Trump. While in office, Trump was hesitant to send aid to areas where people voted against him, such as wildfire-stricken California, according to two former White House staffers.
DeSantis has also been known to put politics before his constituents—especially when it comes to climate issues. Under DeSantis’s leadership, Florida has rejected at least $11 billion in federal funds in the past few years, arguing that the money was part of an “ ideological agenda ” pushed by the Biden administration. Some of these million-dollar programs were rejected because they included measures for climate resiliency.
“It’s so painful to watch as DeSantis turns people into political talking points against the Biden administration,” Florida House Democratic Leader Fentrice Driskell said in January, in response to the report that her state had lost out on billions. “He’ll do it regardless of how it hurts his constituents in Florida. And since he has no logical reason for rejecting those funds, it must be political.”
Earlier this year, DeSantis signed a bill that would eliminate “climate change” as a priority in the state’s energy policies.
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