As President Biden spends a second straight day surveying damage and getting briefed on recovery and relief efforts in the storm-damaged Southeast, he’s once again coming under political attack from former President Trump.
As the death toll from Hurricane Helene climbs to close to 200 people, with hundreds still missing, millions still without power or running water, and damage estimated in the billions, Trump took to social media on Thursday morning to paint Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris as incompetent.
“Kamala and Sleepy Joe are universally being given POOR GRADES for the way that they are handling the Hurricane, especially in North Carolina,” Trump charged in a social media post. “It is going down as the WORST & MOST INCOMPETENTLY MANAGED ‘STORM,’ AT THE FEDERAL LEVEL, EVER SEEN BEFORE.”
Trump, who’s locked in a margin-of-error race with Harris with less than five weeks to go until Election Day in November, has been attacking the vice president and her boss over the federal response to the powerful storm for nearly a week.
BIDEN, HARRIS INSPECT DAMAGE IN HURRICANE-RAVAGED SOUTHEAST IN WAKE OF TRUMP VISIT
Former President Trump visits Valdosta, Georgia, a town impacted by Hurricane Helene, on Monday. (AP Photo/Evan Vucci)
And with two of the hardest-hit states — North Carolina and Georgia — among the seven key battlegrounds that will likely determine the outcome of the 2024 presidential election, the hurricane has become front-and-center in the White House race.
Trump this past weekend accused Biden of “sleeping” at his beach house in Delaware as the storm blasted the Southeast.
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Speaking with reporters as he arrived in Valdosta, Georgia, on Monday to survey storm damage and bring relief aid, the former president charged that “the federal government is not being responsive.”
And Trump falsely claimed that Biden had not spoken with Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp, a conservative Republican.
Pushing back against the political attacks, Biden has noted that he was on the phone with federal, state and local officials throughout the weekend and returned to the nation’s capital on Sunday afternoon to monitor storm rescue and relief efforts.
“We had over 1,000 federal personnel, including search and rescue teams, at the ready on the ground before it hit,” the president said on Tuesday. “Over the past several days, I’ve been in regular contact with the governors, the mayors, the county officials, and all the affected areas. That includes Florida, North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, Tennessee, Alabama and Virginia.”
Biden emphasized that his administration has sent “every available resource that we have at our disposal to the affected region” and pledged “we’ll be there until this work is done.”
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More than half of the deaths from the storm are in North Carolina, where entire communities in the western part of the state were demolished by fast-moving waters.
As the floodwaters from the storm receded, North Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper lamented that, in the western part of his state, “communities were wiped off the map.”
President Biden and North Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper greet first responders after touring areas impacted by Hurricane Helene on Wednesday. (AP Photo/Susan Walsh)
The president on Wednesday was in North Carolina, where he surveyed damage from a helicopter flight over the city of Ashville, one of the hardest hit areas. Biden also visited a rescue command center in the state before also stopping in neighboring South Carolina.
“My top priority is to ensure the communities devastated by this hurricane get the help and support they need as quickly as possible,” Biden told reporters Tuesday as he spoke during a Cabinet meeting focusing on the federal response.
Ahead of his trip to the region, the president green-lighted the use of up to 1,000 active duty troops to support relief efforts.
Huddled with Democratic and Republican politicians from the region on Wednesday, Biden emphasized that “in a moment like this, we put politics aside, at least we should put it all aside. We have here — there are no Democrats or Republicans, only Americans — our job is to help as many people as we can, as quickly as we can, and as thoroughly as we can.”
Trump on Sunday attacked Harris for attending “fundraising events with her radical left lunatic donors” in California over the weekend. And he argued that Harris “ought to be down in the area” where the storm caused destruction.
On Monday during his stop in Georgia, Trump repeated the dig, saying, “The vice president, she’s out someplace campaigning looking for money.”
The White House has highlighted that the vice president over the weekend was on the phone with federal, state and local officials.
Harris said on Saturday that she and the president “remain committed to ensuring that no community or state has to respond to this disaster alone.”
On Monday, Harris visited Federal Emergency Management Agency headquarters in Washington, D.C., where she received a briefing on relief and rescue efforts.
“We will do everything in our power to help communities respond and recover,” she vowed.
Harris on Wednesday traveled to Georgia to survey the impacts of the storm and receive an on-the-ground briefing and provide updates on the federal response.
“We are here for the long haul,” Harris told residents in Augusta. “There’s a lot of work that’s going to need to happen over the coming days, weeks, and months, and the coordination that we have dedicated ourselves to will be long-lasting to get families, to get residents, to get neighborhoods back up and running.”
Harris was originally scheduled to take part Wednesday in a campaign bus swing through central Pennsylvania, another key battleground state, with her running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz.
With the vice president headed to Georgia, Walz headlined the bus tour, which came the day after he faced off in the vice presidential debate against Sen. JD Vance, R-Ohio.
During his Monday stop in Georgia, Trump highlighted, “I’ve come to Valdosta with large semi-trucks, many of them filled with relief aid. A tanker truck filled up with gasoline, a couple of big tanker trucks filled up with gasoline, which they can’t get now. And we’ll be working to distribute it throughout the day.”
And a GoFundMe page set up by the Trump campaign earlier this week has raised over $4 million so far for storm victims.
“I’m committed to traveling to the impacted areas as soon as possible, but I’ve been told that it would be disruptive if I did it right now. We will not do that at the risk of diverting or delaying any of the response assets needed to deal with this crisis,” Biden told reporters on Monday.
And Harris said on Tuesday, “I plan to be on the ground as soon as possible — but as soon as possible without disrupting any emergency response operations, because that must be the highest priority and the first order of business.”
Vice President Kamala Harris greets people who were impacted by Hurricane Helene in Augusta, Georgia, on Wednesday as Augusta Mayor Garnett Johnson, right, looks on. (AP Photo/Carolyn Kaster)
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But the optics of Trump’s Monday stop in Georgia may have put some political pressure on Biden and Harris.
Longtime Republican strategist David Kochel said Trump had been “very aggressive” with his quick trip to the storm-damaged region.
“I think he put a lot of pressure on them to try to do something,” Kochel, a veteran of numerous GOP presidential campaigns, told Fox News. “He’s out there pushing a line that they don’t care, they’re not doing anything, and I think they’re reacting to it.”
The response by elected officials to natural disasters can impact their political standing.
President George W. Bush was heavily criticized in the summer of 2005 for his initial response to Hurricane Katrina, which devastated New Orleans.
And Trump faced criticism early in his White House tenure as Puerto Rico struggled to recover from a powerful storm. The president was pilloried for throwing paper towels to the crowd as he stopped by a relief center during a storm-related visit to the island.
