Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp confirmed Monday that President Joe Biden called him to offer federal help in the wake of Hurricane Helene damage. In this photo, the governor gives an update on hurricane preparations Sept. 26, 2024 ahead of Hurricane Helene making landfall in Florida. Jill Nolin/Georgia Recorder
Hours after the terror attacks on Sept. 11 brought down the Twin Towers, killing thousands of Americans, Donald Trump was bragging that suddenly he owned the tallest building in Manhattan. So yes, we have already established that there is no national calamity so great that Trump won’t try to squeeze personal advantage from it.
It was no surprise, then, that with more than 160 dead, tens of thousands homeless and entire communities destroyed by Hurricane Helene, Trump wasted no time in trying to turn it to his advantage, injecting division, hate and rancor into a situation in which a united response is required.
According to Trump, the Biden administration was rushing aid to Democratic-voting areas while withholding it from Republican areas. According to Trump, President Biden and Vice President Harris were ducking phone calls from Republican governors desperately pleading to get federal help.
“(Gov. Kemp) is doing a very. good job,” Trump said Monday in a visit to hard-hit Valdosta, “but he’s having a hard time getting the president on the phone, I guess. They’re not being responsive. The federal government is not being responsive. They’re having a very hard time getting the president on the phone.”
Those were lies, complete fabrications intended to inject poison into a system already under duress. We know them to be lies, because earlier that same morning, Kemp had recalled a very different version of events.
“The president called me (Sunday) afternoon but I missed his call,” Kemp said. “I called him right back and he just said, ‘Hey, what do you need?’ And I told him, we got what we need. We’ll work through the federal process. And he offered, if there’s other things we need, to just call him directly, which I appreciate.”
Down in Florida, Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis concurred. “We have what we need now,” he said, urging resources be allocated to harder hit areas. “I think most of the effort should be in western North Carolina right now because you still have active rescues that need to take place,” he said.
Another conservative Republican, Gov. Henry McMaster of South Carolina, told the same story. He too recounted Biden taking the initiative, signing an emergency decree for his state before the storm even hit and then reaching out by telephone to ask if anything more was needed. The federal response has been “superb,” he said.
“This is a great team effort,” McMaster said. “It’s going to be done, but this is one that is going to take a lot of patience. We’ve got the team. We have the equipment. The federal government is helping as well. They’re embedded with us, and there’s no asset out there that we have not already accessed.”
As McMaster suggested, relief aid cannot ever get there fast enough in a natural disaster of this magnitude. Patience is difficult, but necessary. State, local and federal governments, Republican and Democratic, working together, are throwing everything they can at the problem.
So where did Trump get this idea that hurricane aid was being parceled out on a partisan basis, with Biden allies getting preference over those backing Republicans? He got it from his own cruelly twisted mind.
During the COVID crisis, then-President Trump opposed passage of an emergency relief package in Congress because he thought Democratic states would benefit more. He said he was willing to provide aid to blue states, but only if they were “nice” to him. With masks, gowns and ventilators in short supply, he told Fox News that Democratic governors “have to get that gear themselves,” adding that “they shouldn’t be hitting us.”
According to the former chief of staff for the Department of Homeland Security under Trump, the former president also tried to block aid to California after a huge wildfire killed 85 people, left 50,000 homeless and destroyed an estimated 18,000 structures.
“He told us to stop giving money to people whose houses had burned down because he was so rageful that people in the state of California didn’t support him,” as Miles Taylor later recounted. In time, Trump relented and finally allowed the aid to go through, perhaps in part because someone told him that the region scorched by the Camp Fire is strongly conservative.
For most of American history, such an attitude would have been unthinkable. We help each other out. E pluribus unum, and all that. If we cannot come together to help each other in time of need, without regard to party or personal loyalty, then we have already lost what once was our greatest strength.
I know there are many conservatives in Georgia who know this is wrong and dangerous, and who want to see Brian Kemp as the future of what they hope will be a more sane, decent and competitive Republican Party, a party that doesn’t need to disguise its ugliness behind so many lies.
However, that future is not possible until Trump is forced to leave the political scene, and in fact it becomes less and less likely with every day he is allowed to dominate their party. They have the votes, should they choose to use them in November, to hasten that day.
YOU MAKE OUR WORK POSSIBLE.