Page 60 of 107 Days
I canceled my campaign swing through Nevada and rescheduled media interviews, including with Alex Cooper of the podcast Call Her Daddy . I needed to head back to FEMA headquarters in Washington, DC.
I had a lot of experience at this. As a senator I’d been on the committee that oversees FEMA, and I had an excellent relationship of trust with the agency’s leadership.
During the first Trump administration I’d seen how relief efforts had been shaped by a petty partisan agenda, and I was determined not to let anything like that happen on my watch.
And even as I was taking valuable time from my campaign to fulfill my responsibilities as vice president, Trump posted on his social media site that Joe and I were “going out of [our] way to not help people in Republican areas” hit by Hurricane Helene.
In a second post, he said we had “left Americans to drown in North Carolina, Georgia, Tennessee, Alabama, and elsewhere in the South.” He claimed that Georgia’s Republican governor, Brian Kemp, had a “hard time” reaching Biden to discuss disaster relief, and that the president had been “very non-responsive.”
All of it was, of course, lies.
Kemp quickly rebutted Trump’s claim, saying the president had called him and asked, simply, “What do you need?”
More than 230 people had died in the worst hurricane since Katrina, but instead of consoling and helping, Trump was stoking rage with falsehoods and making it harder for FEMA workers to do their jobs.
Some FEMA workers had guns pulled on them.
At his rallies, he claimed that our administration had “spent all” of the disaster relief money “for housing illegal immigrants.” As he knew, or should have known, the much smaller fund for migrant shelter is totally different from FEMA’s disaster relief fund.
It was Trump who, when president, took money from the disaster fund and directed it toward immigration enforcement.
He tried to connect his bogus claims to his assertions about noncitizens voting.
He said we’d given the FEMA money “to their illegal immigrants that they want to have vote for them this season.”
Elon Musk would pick up the lies and amplify them in his own post: “Yes, they are literally using YOUR tax dollars to import voters and disenfranchise you!”
“Yes they can control the weather,” Marjorie Taylor Greene would pile on.
On the plane I called and spoke with Governor Roy Cooper in North Carolina, Brian Kemp in Georgia, and mayors in the worst-hit communities in all the affected states.
I tried repeatedly to reach Ron DeSantis, who remained unavailable.
The list of what we were doing to help was extensive.
FEMA trucks of food and water were arriving.
Twenty-four search-and-rescue task forces had been deployed and already rescued and supported more than 1,400 people.
The Coast Guard, the Army Corps of Engineers, the Environmental Protection Agency, the Department of Agriculture, the Small Business Administration, and the Department of Energy had all deployed personnel.
It was, in fact, a massive relief effort.
Sadly, in the aftermath, polls in the affected communities would show that whether people felt that the federal government had done a good job split exactly on party lines.