donald trump Is using Hurricane Helene’s destruction to promote his presidential bid kamala harrisThe Republican nominee spread lies about the federal response during a visit to the hurricane-hit city, political analysts said Tuesday.
Analysts said Trump is taking advantage of the storm’s potential political threat to the presidential campaign of his 2024 White House rival, Democrat Harris.
Trump visited the battleground city of Valdosta in Georgia on Monday and falsely said Democratic President Joe Biden was unresponsive to the storm’s destruction. Harris is also Biden’s vice president.
Trump said he brought “truckloads of goods” to Georgia, including oil, water and equipment, and partnered with evangelical Christian leader Franklin Graham’s relief organization to distribute them.
Natural disasters have plagued US administrations in the past and Trump is trying to tie Harris to this storm, which has hit the US Southeast, including the battleground states of Georgia and North Carolina, said Andrew, a professor at Washington University in St. Louis. said Reeves, who has studied how natural disasters affect American politics.
“If there’s a big glitch in the response, it could unsettle him,” Reeves said. “Trump is trying to be president and trying to create a media narrative around his focus on the crisis.”
Georgia and North Carolina will play an important role in the outcome of the November 5 election between Trump and Harris. Buncombe County, the hardest-hit area of North Carolina, voted for Biden in 2020, while most other counties in the western part of the state went for Trump.
Lowndes County, Georgia, where Valdosta is located, voted for Trump in 2020. But even a few thousand votes in each state could decide which presidential candidate wins those states and potentially determine the outcome of the White House race.
According to the White House, more than 3,500 federal employees are involved in response efforts in the affected states.
Analysts said it was unusual for a presidential candidate who is not in office to visit a disaster-stricken area.
Stuart Rothenberg, a non-partisan political analyst, said natural disasters, especially hurricanes, have shaped American politics in recent years and could change the direction of the race this year as well.
“It gives Donald Trump an opportunity to come to the rescue as the savior,” he said.
This is not the first time that Trump has tried to use a disaster for political gain. While visiting the site of a toxic train derailment in Ohio in 2023, Trump criticized the Biden administration’s response as a “betrayal.”
The President and presidential candidates generally do not immediately visit the hurricane-hit area because they fear they will distract from rescue efforts and overwhelm the resources of local law enforcement officials and emergency responders.
Biden said he would visit North Carolina on Wednesday and Georgia and Florida soon after. He may also ask Congress to return to Washington for a special session to pass supplemental aid funding.
The White House said Harris planned to travel to Augusta, Georgia, on Wednesday and to North Carolina in the coming days.
He spoke by phone with local leaders and cut the West Coast campaign short to attend a hastily arranged briefing at Federal Emergency Management Agency headquarters on Monday. There, when a reporter asked whether the crisis was being politicized, he looked away and shook his head.
The Harris campaign did not immediately respond to a request for comment Tuesday.
“While Biden and Harris have abandoned Americans in a time of crisis, President Trump is ahead,”
Trump spokeswoman Carolyn Levitt said in a statement.
More than 100 people died in North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, Florida, Tennessee and Virginia as a result of the storm, and the death toll is expected to rise.
Survivors will be eligible for federal disaster aid, but Trump has also authorized a GoFundMe fundraising campaign “as an official response to MAGA supporters.” The campaign has raised over $2 million to date. “MAGA” refers to Trump’s “Make America Great Again” campaign slogan.
Levitt declined to specify how the funds would be spent.
In 2019, a New York state judge ordered Trump to pay $2 million for misusing his namesake charitable foundation, resulting in the funds being used to further his 2016 presidential campaign. Trump defended the charity at the time, saying that the foundation was an “incredibly effective philanthropy” that had made “some small technical violations.”
In Georgia, Trump falsely claimed that Georgia’s Republican Governor Brian Kemp was having a “hard time” getting Biden on the phone. Kemp told reporters that Biden had called him the evening before and said he was grateful for the federal aid Biden had provided.
Biden said Trump is lying.
Reeves’ research found that when sitting presidents approved disaster aid closer to their re-election they received a modest increase of half a percentage point.
During Trump’s 2017 visit to San Juan, Puerto Rico, after Hurricane Maria, the then-president threw rolls of paper towels into a crowd of local residents affected by the storm. The move was criticized by some local officials.
While campaigning for re-election in 2012, President Barack Obama accompanied Republican Governor Chris Christie on a tour of parts of New Jersey that were affected by Superstorm Sandy. Christie was at the time a top defender of Obama’s Republican rival Mitt Romney.
Republican President George W. Bush after Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans in 2005. Bush’s approval ratings fell and never recovered.
Republican pollster Whit Ayers said that disasters can be make-or-break events for officeholders, but not necessarily for candidates. “Candidates have no responsibility to deal with major disasters,” he said.