Trump claims Hurricane Helene response ‘going even worse’ than Katrina

Former President Trump on Thursday repeatedly attacked Vice President Harris and the Biden administration’s response to Hurricane Helene by claiming that the federal response so far has been worse than Hurricane Katrina in the latest instance of him turning a natural disaster into a political advantage.

Trump held a rally with supporters in Saginaw, Mich., where he repeatedly claimed the federal government did not have enough funds to respond to the devastation in Florida, Georgia and North Carolina because the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) had spent its money on migrants, a notion the White House pushed back heavily on.

“There’s nobody that’s handled a hurricane or storm worse than what they’re doing right now,” Trump said. “Kamala spent all her FEMA money, billions of dollars, on housing for illegal migrants. Many of whom should not be in our country.”

The White House spent the last 24 hours pushing back on Republicans who echoed similar, unsubstantiated claims.

“This is FALSE. The Disaster Relief Fund is specifically appropriated by Congress to prepare for, respond to, recover from, and mitigate impacts of natural disasters,” White House spokesperson Angelo Fernández Hernández said in a statement. “It is completely separate from other grant programs administered by FEMA for DHS.”

Biden has also called on Congress to return from recess to pass additional funding to assist with the recovery efforts. The House and Senate are not due to return to Washington until after the election.

Despite that, Trump went on to call the federal response to Helene “the worst response in the history of hurricanes.”

“A certain president, I will not name him, destroyed his reputation with Katrina,” Trump said, referring to former President George W. Bush. “And this is going even worse. She’s doing even worse than he did.”

The Biden administration has deployed more than 4,800 federal officials to support response efforts, and the president directed the deployment of up to 1,000 troops to assist in North Carolina’s recovery.

President Biden traveled Wednesday to North Carolina to tour storm damage, and he visited Florida and Georgia on Thursday to do the same. He was notably not joined by either Republican governor of either state. Harris traveled to Georgia on Wednesday and is expected to visit North Carolina in the coming days.

The federal government has also been working with states to provide housing assistance for those who need it and to restore power amid widespread outages. Biden has approved major disaster declarations for Georgia, Florida, North Carolina, South Carolina and Virginia to free up additional resources.

Trump has spent much of the week attacking his political opponents for the response to Hurricane Helene, which killed more than 200 people across multiple states. It is the deadliest storm since Hurricane Katrina, which caused nearly 1,400 fatalities.

It’s only fed Trump’s history of politicizing responses to natural disasters.

He repeatedly feuded with officials in Puerto Rico as multiple hurricanes hit the island in 2017, the first year he was in office when he claimed without evidence that Democrats had inflated the death toll from Hurricane Maria to make him look bad.

Trump in 2019 insisted Alabama could bear the brunt of Hurricane Dorian, which ultimately landed on the East Coast. In making his claim, Trump used a marked-up projection map produced by the National Oceanic Atmospheric Administration that conflicted with information given by weather forecasters.

During devastating wildfires in California in 2018, E&E News reported Thursday that White House officials had to show then-President Trump voter data to convince him to release funding for California wildfire victims, hesitating to give money to a blue state.

“You can’t only help those in need if they voted for you,” Biden posted on the social platform X in response to the report. “It’s the most basic part of being president, and this guy knows nothing about it.”