As President Joe Biden delivered a solemn warning Wednesday about Hurricane Milton — urging Floridians to heed local officials and brace for “the storm of the century” — he paused before offering another admonition, one chiefly aimed at Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump.
“The last few weeks, there’s been a reckless, irresponsible, relentless promotion of disinformation and outright lies that are disturbing people,” Biden said from the White House, blaming Trump for leading an “onslaught of lies” about the storms. “It’s ridiculous, and it’s got to stop.”
The moment, coming after Trump had blasted Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris for their disaster management and hours before Milton was set to make landfall, highlighted how two massive storm systems have collided with the final stage of the presidential campaign, amplifying the nation’s sharpest political divisions as millions prepare to go to the polls.
For a turbulent presidential race that has already been jolted by a felony conviction, assassination attempts and a late-stage candidate switch, the arrival of back-to-back monster hurricanes is testing the nation’s political fabric even as it challenges the government’s ability to mount a comprehensive response.
The storms have become particularly consequential for Harris, whose truncated presidential campaign is focused on introducing herself as a steady leader in contrast to Trump’s erratic governing style. In recent days, she has upended her campaign schedule to visit with victims of Hurricane Helene, joined multiple high-level briefings and held calls with local officials across the Southeast. She has also blasted Trump as selfish and “extraordinarily irresponsible” for peddling falsehoods about the recovery effort.
Yet some of Harris’s decisions — including attending splashy fundraisers and political events after Helene made landfall, and participating in lighthearted interviews as Milton was bearing down on Florida — have opened her up to criticism from opponents aiming to cast the storm recovery effort as lackluster and disjointed.
As Trump was cycling through attacks over Hurricane Helene last week, often embracing falsehoods and conspiracy theories, the approach of Hurricane Milton ensured that storm politics would be a defining feature of the campaign’s closing stretch, said Tevi Troy, a presidential historian. While presidential candidates may seek an edge in the aftermath of a disaster, there is risk in seeming too focused on the electoral impact at a time that has traditionally been apolitical, said Troy, author of “Shall We Wake The President? Two Centuries of Disaster Management from the Oval Office.”
“If you are seen as the one who’s politicizing it, the negativity will redound upon you in a significant way,” he said. “So there are incentives in terms of wanting to make sure the response goes right, but also that you don’t want to be the one politicizing.”
Hurricane Helene made landfall on Sept. 26, tearing through parts of Florida and Georgia before devastating much of western North Carolina. As the death toll mounted — ultimately exceeding 230 to become the deadliest hurricane since Katrina in 2005 — the Trump and Harris campaigns quickly confronted the reality that the response could shape the final weeks of the presidential race, not least because Georgia and North Carolina are among the few true battlegrounds.
Trump wasted little time jumping into the fray, traveling to Georgia on Sept. 30 and launching into sharp criticism of the White House as Harris and Biden stayed away amid the early stages of the recovery, saying they did not want to interfere with recovery efforts.
Trump’s false claim that Biden had been ignoring the state’s Republican governor, Brian Kemp, kicked off similar attacks. Trump and his allies would go on to claim that the Federal Emergency Management Agency had given money to migrants rather than storm victims, that Republican-leaning areas were being bypassed by the government, and that Harris had sent millions to Lebanon while limiting hurricane victims to $750.
The assertions, while not based in fact, dovetailed with Trump’s message about a government supposedly weaponized against conservatives and favoring foreigners over Americans.
“This has been the worst hurricane response by a president and vice president since Katrina, and this is simply not acceptable,” Trump said Saturday at a rally in Pennsylvania. “They’re offering them $750 to people whose homes have been washed away, and yet we send tens of billions of dollars to foreign countries that most people have never heard of.”
The $750 payments, designed to defray immediate costs as claims are processed, represent just a portion of the federal funds that victims can access.
Trump’s reference to Hurricane Katrina, which struck New Orleans in 2005, highlighted how national campaigns have collided with natural disasters throughout history. President George W. Bush’s response to Katrina was widely faulted, helping the Democrats retake both chambers of Congress the following year. The government’s response to Hurricane Andrew in 1992 was likewise seen as subpar, contributing to the defeat of his father, George H.W. Bush, months later.
In contrast, President Barack Obama’s handling of Superstorm Sandy, which hit much of the Eastern Seaboard in 2012, may have helped propel him to reelection.
As Harris has blasted Trump for spreading misinformation about Hurricane Helene, she has leaned into her core message about him, that he is concerned only with himself. “It’s about him. It’s not about you,” she said this week of Trump’s comments.
Harris’s campaign has calculated that a competent and compassionate response to the storms would itself refute Trump’s charges, and her allies have highlighted comments by several Republican governors complimenting the administration’s quick actions.
The vice president, who was in California as Helene marched across the Southeast, eventually cut short her trip and returned to Washington early for a FEMA briefing. But by the time Air Force Two landed and her motorcade arrived at FEMA’s headquarters, Trump had already been on the ground in Georgia.
Trump’s team believed Harris was making a mistake by not getting to Georgia and North Carolina sooner, which is one reason he rushed a trip there, said one Trump adviser who, like others, spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal deliberations. “It was an opportunity for us,” the adviser said.
Harris traveled to Georgia and North Carolina last week and met with survivors of the storm. As Hurricane Milton gathered in the Gulf of Mexico this week, Harris used a series of interviews to argue that Trump’s response to the hurricane proved he lacked the empathy and temperament to be president. “The last thing that [hurricane victims] deserve is to have a so-called leader make them more afraid than they already are,” she said on CNN.
While many of Trump’s assertions about the response were false, FEMA has faced genuine problems. FEMA employees have struggled to reach some of Helene’s victims, especially in remote, mountainous parts of North Carolina. And the sheer extent of the area struck by the storm, covering six states, has strained the agency’s capacity.
While some Democrats saw the storms as an opportunity to highlight the role of climate change, Harris has not broached the topic. Scientists agree that Helene and Milton owe their ferocity in large part to unusually high water temperatures in the Gulf of Mexico.
But Harris, locked in a tight race with Trump in states like Pennsylvania and Michigan, whose economies in different ways rely heavily on fossil fuels, has kept a low profile when it comes to aggressive climate strategies, and the storms so far have not changed that.
On Wednesday, the vice president released a statement warning against price gouging, which has been one of the themes of her campaign’s push against inflation. Harris’s campaign has also released an ad featuring former Trump administration officials who criticized him for politicizing past disasters.
As the White House has pushed back against misinformation, it has received some help from Republicans in affected areas who fear conspiracy theories will hamper the recovery effort. Republican Rep. Chuck Edwards, who represents hard-hit western North Carolina, released a lengthy statement Tuesday debunking “Helene response myths,” including some of the claims that Trump has espoused.
“FEMA has NOT diverted disaster response funding to the border or foreign aid,” he wrote, in a statement that also clarified that the storm had not been engineered by the government.
But Edwards also asserted that the FEMA response “has had its shortfalls,” and some criticisms of the Biden administration’s handling of Helene have been more polished than Trump’s allegations or hoaxes spreading online. In an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal, Trump’s running mate, Ohio Sen. JD Vance, criticized Biden and Harris for not activating the military more quickly to reach hard-hit areas in North Carolina after the storm.
“Shortly after Helene made landfall in the U.S. on Sept. 26, Joe Biden was at his house in Rehoboth Beach, Del. Vice President Kamala Harris was flying between ritzy California fundraisers, hobnobbing with celebrities,” Vance wrote. “The lack of prioritization had real-world ramifications.”
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) was asked about disinformation at his morning press briefing Wednesday, specifically a tweet telling residents not to evacuate and citing supposed shenanigans by FEMA. DeSantis scoffed.
“Listen, I think most people are wise to this,” he said. “You know, we live in an era where if you put out crap online, you can get a lot of people to share it and you can monetize that. That’s just the way it is.”
DeSantis also clashed with Harris this week after reports emerged that he refused to accept her call ahead of Helene. During a news conference, DeSantis denied that he had declined her call but suggested that the vice president was being “selfish” and aiming to score political points.
Harris, in turn, told reporters that DeSantis was being “utterly irresponsible.”
It is too early to know if the storms will have a significant electoral impact, but both campaigns have begun gaming out how votes in key hurricane-ravaged states could shift.
Trump campaign employees are trying to decipher how many of their likely voters are affected in North Carolina and Georgia — a number some aides believe is in the hundreds of thousands — and how to get them to vote. They have been particularly worried about North Carolina, where the flooding hit a number of areas where Trump has strong support.
Hurricane Milton is also having a more immediate impact on Trump’s operation. His campaign office in Palm Beach, Fla., is a “ghost town” with people evacuating for safer spaces ahead of the storm, an adviser said. Employees have been told to go somewhere safe.
The political swiping in some sense has demonstrated how much the country has changed since 2012, when Obama and then-Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey (R) shared a bipartisan embrace after Sandy decimated the Garden State, Troy said.
Mike DuHaime, a GOP political consultant who was one of Christie’s top advisers during that storm, said the infighting ahead of Hurricane Milton was “dangerous” for the candidates involved. “There are a few moments where the public expects you to put your politics aside, and that’s one of them,” he said.
Nick Iarossi, a Florida lobbyist close to DeSantis, said that despite the burst of partisan rhetoric, those in charge are behaving responsibly.
“I believe the Republican governors are communicating well with the feds, and that President Biden is also being cooperative in getting federal resources to help,” Iarossi said. “The governors and the president are not playing politics. That’s the silver lining in all this.”
Patrick Svitek and Lori Rozsa contributed to this report.