Donald Trump’s Project 2025 would raise the FEMA threshold for disaster declarations, eliminate direct lending from the SBA to aid businesses impacted by disasters, and effectively privatize the National Weather Service.
Oh, and the National Hurricane Center, which is supposed to help us get ready for pending disasters, would be neutered by having a monitor watching over its shoulder to make sure it’s not going too far by perhaps politicizing our new, stronger, more devastating hurricanes as maybe being the result of man-made climate change.
It’s adorable, then, that Trump, in addition to staging a photo-op on Monday in Valdosta, Ga., one of dozens of communities in the southeast devastated by the remnants of Hurricane Helene, is trying to use the storm as a political weapon against Vice President Kamala Harris.
ICYMI
“Biden and Harris abandoned Americans in Afghanistan. They sacrificed Americans to an Open Border, and now, they have left Americans to drown in North Carolina, Georgia, Tennessee, Alabama, and elsewhere in the South. Under this Administration, Americans always come last, because we have ‘leaders’ who have no idea how to lead!” the ex-president posted in a message on his social-media site.
It was actually Trump who threw rolls of paper towels at Puerto Ricans after the island was decimated by Hurricane Maria in 2017, as his administration stiffed Puerto Rico’s request for aid until the eve of the 2020 presidential election.
The Trump administration also punished North Carolina for electing Democrat Roy Cooper governor in the aftermath of Hurricane Matthew in 2017, granting just $6.1 million of the $929 million in disaster aid requested by the state, and threatened to block federal aid to California, another state with a Democratic governor, Gavin Newsom, when that state was in the throes of a wildfire disaster in 2020.
It’s this guy who dares to talk about a president abandoning anybody
He also dared to tell a pair of outright lies on Monday with respect to Helene – the first, on another social-media post, claiming that he was getting reports about the federal government and Gov. Cooper “going out of their way to not help people in Republican areas,” which is projection at its best; the second that Georgia’s Gov. Brian Kemp was “having a hard time getting the president on the phone” to discuss his state’s needs.
Pressed by a reporter on the claim about North Carolina, Trump tried to brush him off, saying, “I’ve got nothing for you right now. Go find it yourself.”
On the second, there is Gov. Kemp, who had said in a press event earlier in the day on Monday that he had spoken with President Biden on Sunday.
“He just said, Hey, what do you need? And I told him, you know, we got what we need, we’ll work through the federal process. He offered that if there’s any other things we need just to call him directly, which, I appreciate that,” Kemp said.
The last bit here in this story on Trump’s disgusting day trying to score political points as bodies are literally being found in trees has to do with his utter lack of basic knowledge.
He actually said, in the photo-op in Valdosta, that Helene was “so extensive, nobody thought this would be happening, especially now, it’s so late in the season for the hurricanes.”
September is the heart of the peak of the hurricane season in the United States.
You can’t make up how utterly dense this guy is, folks.