Photo: Carolyn Kaster Associated Press Democratic candidate Kamala Harris visited Augusta on October 2 to see the damage from Hurricane Helene.
Fabien Deglise
Published yesterday at 5:23 p.m. Updated yesterday at 5:41 p.m. Analysis
- United States
After hurricane Helene a few days ago, the imminent arrival of tropical storm Milton, expected to be the most violent to hit the Tampa region in Florida in a century, on Wednesday evening, is not only putting American civil security on alert. It also seems to be contributing to the formation of another cyclone, in the political sphere, where the two camps currently campaigning are attacking each other, with this natural disaster as a backdrop, thus complicating both the prevention and the future management of the ongoing climate drama.
Vice President Kamala Harris on Monday accused Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis of “playing political games” after he reportedly refused to take calls from the Democratic nominee who wanted to discuss resources and rebuilding with the local official after Hurricane Helene on Sept. 24. The Republican reportedly called the move “partisan” to justify his silence, according to a member of her entourage quoted by NBC.
“People are in desperate need of support right now, and playing political games in the height of an emergency is completely irresponsible and selfish,” Harris said in a clip aired Monday on Fox News. On the same network, DeSantis responded by calling the Democrat's comments “delusional” and accusing her in turn of seeking “to politicize the storm” simply because she is “on the campaign trail,” he added.
She wouldn’t be the only one trying to do so, by the way. Earlier this week, Donald Trump took to his capital letters and his social network to attack his political opponent without much nuance: “The response to Hurricane [Helene] by lying Kamala Harris is now ranked the worst response in history,” he wrote. “North Carolina, Georgia, Florida, South Carolina, Tennessee, Alabama and the rest will remember this by voting for Trump,” he proclaimed.
After the torrential rain and violent winds that hit several southern states in late September, and as Milton approaches,which could become a Category 3 hurricane when it hits the west coast of Florida, it is a storm of tackles, rumors and misinformation that is now hitting the American political terrain.
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On Monday, the same Donald Trump accused the administration of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris of having diverted “almost all the money intended for the Federal Emergency Management Agency,” FEMA, to support “illegal immigration,” he wrote to his millions of subscribers, calling on them to vote for him in November.
On Friday, his new friend, billionaire Elon Musk, attacked the Agency, accusing it of preventing ordinary citizens, like himself and members of his company SpaceX, from offering aid to victims left in the wake of the hurricane. Elsewhere online, conspiracies proliferate about lands struck by the storm and confiscated by the Agency, about racial discrimination in the distribution of aid, or about the village of Chimney Rock, in North Carolina, abandoned by Civil Defense to allow Joe Biden to extract lithium there.
“Everything that’s being shown and said on this subject is false,” summarized the mayor of the said village, Peter O’Leary, quoted this week by NPR. “It’s a little disturbing and upsetting to see people believing horrible things rather than the truth.”
The climate of distrust, doubt and lies deliberately fueled by the American right has also forced the federal agency to no longer only manage the emergency and the distribution of aid on the ground, but also to maintain a page on its Web site to re-establish the facts on several of these “alternative” realities suspended in the air. And this is even though the damage seems to have already been done.
“This government is giving money to Ukraine right now, but it is not helping citizens here in the United States during the hurricane,” summarized in the pages of the Washington PostAshley Flores, 30, met at an event organized by a group of Latino supporters of Donald Trump in Las Vegas, Nevada. You see it in real time. They don’t want to give anything. They don’t care about American citizens.”
Kamala Harris slammed her Republican opponent for spreading rumors and misinformation about disaster relief in the public space, calling the move “extremely irresponsible.” “ This is about him again, not you,” she told reporters before flying to New York, noting that “FEMA has a lot of resources available to those who desperately need them.”
Action, reaction. The Democrat’s campaign team decided to launch an online campaign in the last few days that highlights the irony of Donald Trump’s attacks on the Biden-Harris administration by highlighting the way he, as president, has dealt with similar natural disasters. “He would suggest not giving aid to states that didn’t vote for him,” Kevin Carroll, a former senior adviser to the Department of Homeland Security, says in the ad.
A Politico investigation found that in 2017, his administration was quicker to come to the aid of hurricane victims in Texas than in Puerto Rico. The following year, Trump hesitated to support victims of major wildfires in California, before realizing that several affected regions had a high concentration of Republican voters.
In the face of flooding in Michigan in 2020, Donald Trump also threatened to block aid funding because of the local government's decision to make it easier to vote by mail, CBS reported at the time.