By Mike Killalea, NSD president
It’s becoming crystal clear that disinformation is the MAGA strategy for the Orange Convicted Felon’s November electoral loss, and nowhere is that previewed more fully than in MAGA’s campaign of lies about Hurricane Helene recovery.
Plenty of outlets describe the “barrage of lies and distortions,” as CNN described MAGA’s response to the federal response to Hurricane Helene. Here’s one: https://www.cnn.com/2024/10/06/politics/fact-check-trump-helene-response-north-carolina/index.html.
FEMA recognizes the fusillade of lies, enough so that it published a “Rumor Response” page -- https://www.fema.gov/disaster/current/hurricane-helene/rumor-response .
And our good friend AI is being used to perpetuate the equally false narratives of awful government service and Trump as savior. Check out Jay Kuo -- https://substack.com/home/post/p-149919112?source=queue .
But as President, Trump had multiple opportunities to help millions of Americans in desperate need of disaster relief. What does the record show?
Indifferent to readiness
From practically the moment of his swearing in, Trump showed that he could not care less about disaster readiness.
· Months into his term, Trump had left key disaster response positions unfilled
· Five months into Trump’s presidency, FEMA and NOAA were still without administrators
· Ahead of a “potentially record-breaking” hurricane season, Trump imposed a government-wide hiring freeze that resulted in 216 vacant positions at the National Weather Service
· NOAA Spokesman: “The hiring freeze was a contributing factor” in the agency’s decline in ranks ahead of hurricanes Harvey, Irma and Maria
· The National Hurricane Center went without a leader under Trump longer than under any other president
His neglect shows. Remember Hurricane Maria?
‘Big water’ doomed Trumpian relief for Puerto Rico
Cat 4 Hurricane Marie’s devastating September 2017 landfall in Puerto Rico killed nearly 3,000 people in that territory alone (a figure Trump disputed, BTW), and caused more than $90 billion in damages, most of that in Puerto Rico alone.
Trump consistently downplayed the damage. There was plenty of it:
· It took nearly a year for the entire island to regain power
· Studies attributed thousands of excess deaths to the slow recovery after hurricane maria
· Trump claimed that Puerto Rico’s relief was complicated by “big water, ocean water”
· Adding insult to injury, records revealed that the Trump Administration exerted more effort towards disaster relief in Texas compared to Puerto Rico after Maria
Topping that off, it turns out that his administration obstructed an investigation looking into why officials withheld about $20 billion in hurricane relief for Puerto Rico.
And I haven’t even mentioned how Trump tossed rolls of paper towels to the desperate people in Puerto Rico.
Hurricane Dorian: Sharpie-gate
Ahead of Hurricane Dorian in 2019, Trump altered with his Sharpie pen a National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration map of the storm’s trajectory to suggest that Alabama would be hit. After the National Weather Service corrected Trump’s claim, he doubled down, insisting that Hurricane Dorian would hit Alabama. Hurricane Dorian did not hit Alabama.
Trump rolls back flood protections: predictable results
Trump also rolled back critical flood protections that protected Americans from rising sea levels. During Trump’s term, the U.S. saw $5 billion from flooding events that caused $28.5 billion in damages and killed 37 people.
… and the damned wall
The construction of Trump’s border wall also exacerbated flooding and threatened wildlife.
Refusing fire-relief aid to ‘blue’ California
For California, the 2018 wildfire season marked the “deadliest and most destructive” one on record, fire officials say. But then-President Donald Trump reportedly nearly declined to approve federal aid because of the state’s political makeup.
Trump changed his mind, however, after he was shown voter registration data from Orange County where Republicans then had an edge over Democrats, Politico reported.
In a phone call Thursday, Mark Harvey, who served as a special assistant to the president for matters related to domestic crisis at the time, confirmed to the Southern California News Group the exchange reported by Politico. The former National Security Council employee is among the more than 100 former Republican national security officials who have backed Vice President Kamala Harris in this election.
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