One day after Hurricane Milton tore a path of destruction across Florida, the death toll is rising and millions remain without power or running water.
As recovery efforts in Florida reach a fever pitch, there’s no letup in the war of words between President Biden and former President Trump over the federal government’s response to Milton and Hurricane Helene, which smashed into the southeast two weeks ago.
With Trump continuing to charge that Biden and Vice President Harris have been slow and ineffective in steering the government’s storm efforts, the president once again fired back.
“Vice President Harris and I have been in constant contact with the state and local officials. We’re offering everything they need,” Biden emphasized on Thursday.
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President Biden speaks and gives an update on the impact and the ongoing response to Hurricane Milton, in the South Court Auditorium on the White House complex Oct. 10, 2024. (AP Photo/Susan Walsh)
With less than four weeks to go until Election Day, Harris and Trump are locked in a narrow margin-of-error showdown in the race to succeed Biden in the White House, and with two of the hardest-hit states from Helene — North Carolina and Georgia — among the seven key battlegrounds that will likely determine the outcome of the 2024 election, the politics of federal disaster relief are again front and center on the campaign trail.
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For nearly two weeks, Trump has been turning up the volume.
“THE WORST RESPONSE TO A STORM OR HURRICANE DISASTER IN U.S. HISTORY,” Trump claimed in a social media post on Tuesday.
“The worst hurricane response since Katrina,” the former president charged on Wednesday as he pointed to the much-maligned initial federal response to Hurricane Katrina in 2005, which was heavily criticized for being slow and ineffective.
On Thursday at a campaign event in Michigan, Trump kept up the attacks. He praised southern Republican governors for doing a “fantastic job” reacting to the storms and argued that “the federal government, on the other hand, has not done what you’re supposed to be doing, in particular, with respect to North Carolina. They’ve let those people suffer unjustly, unjustly.”
The former president has also repeatedly made false claims that FEMA (Federal Emergency Management Agency) diverted money intended for disaster relief and spent it on undocumented migrants in the U.S. as he turned up the volume on his inflammatory rhetoric over the combustible issue of illegal immigration.
“You know where they gave the money to: illegal immigrants coming,” Trump said at Wednesday’s rally as the crowd of MAGA supporters loudly booed.
DESANTIS AND HARRIS TRADE FIRE OVER HURRICANE CALL
Hours later, Biden pushed back, accusing the Republican presidential nominee of leading an “onslaught of lies.”
Biden charged that the rhetoric from Trump and other Republicans was “beyond ridiculous” and that “it’s got to stop.”
President Biden talks with Deanne Criswell, administrator of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, at Greenville-Spartanburg International Airport in Greer, S.C., Oct. 2, 2024, to survey damage from Hurricane Helene. (AP Photo/Susan Walsh)
On Thursday, as he updated federal hurricane response efforts, Biden told reporters that Trump needed to “get a life, man, help these people.”
And he argued that “the public will hold him [Trump] accountable” for making false claims regarding the capabilities of FEMA to assist storm victims.
Trump campaign national press secretary Karoline Leavitt, responding to the criticism, said in a statement to Fox News on Thursday that Trump has been “working hard every day to save this country from the mess Biden and Kamala got us into.”
And Trump’s son, Eric, in a social media post, highlighted that the family has opened up one of its Florida hotels to house over 200 linemen who are helping in the storm’s aftermath.
Trump last week also launched a GoFundMe campaign for victims of Hurricane Helene in Georgia, which has raised more than $7 million so far.
But his criticism of the federal response has also been chided by Harris.
Democratic presidential nominee Vice President Harris arrives at LaGuardia Airport, Oct. 7, 2024, in New York. (AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin)
“This is not a time for us to just point fingers at each other as Americans,” the vice president said in a Wednesday interview on the Weather Channel. “Anybody who considers themselves to be a leader should really be in the business right now of giving people a sense of confidence that we’re all working together and that we have the resources and the ability to work together on their behalf.”
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Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, who spoke with Biden on Thursday morning after the storm hit, seemed to compliment the administration’s storm efforts.
“I spoke with the president this morning,” DeSantis said during one of his round-the-clock briefings. “He said he wants to be helpful. And so if we have a request, he said, send them his way, and he wants to help us get the job done. So I appreciate being able to collaborate across the federal, state and local governments and work together to put the people first.”
Fox News’ Kirill Clark and Matteo Cina contributed to this report.