Trump's Long History of Politically Weaponizing Disaster Relief

A recent story from E&E News revealed how Trump played political games with relief efforts during California wildfires in 2018. That was just tip of the iceberg.

Written for MeidasTouch by Troy Matthews.

According to reporting from Politico, Donald Trump, as President, initially refused to provide aid to California to assist with deadly wildfires until an aide showed him how many of his voters lived in the state.

During the disastrous 2018 wildfire season, Trump’s initial response was to deny a request from California for federal disaster aid. According to two former Trump White House aides, that decision was political; Trump refused to help because of California's heavily Democratic leanings. He publicly blamed the state government for the fires, stating that better mitigation measures were needed, such as “raking the forest.”

An investigation by Politico found that, on at least three occasions, Trump hesitated to give disaster aid to areas he considered politically hostile, or conversely, ordered special treatment for pro-Trump states.

Ultimately, Trump was persuaded to change his mind on California when Mark Harvey, Trump’s senior director for resilience policy on the National Security Council staff, showed him that he had more voters in Orange County, California alone than in the entire state of Iowa.

“We went as far as looking up how many votes he got in those impacted areas… to show him, ‘these are people who voted for you,’” Harvey said.

The 2018 wildfire season in California resulted in 103 confirmed fatalities, 24,226 structures damaged or destroyed, and at least $26.34 billion in property damage and firefighting costs.

Trump’s record on disaster relief while in office was monumentally poor. The focus of his administration was largely on cutting or diverting spending on FEMA, as well as attempting to reduce funding for NOAA weather prediction programs, despite the increasing threat of climate change and larger storms.

Trump’s philosophy toward disaster relief mirrors that of most Republicans in Congress today, including Reps. Marjorie Taylor Greene and Matt Gaetz of Georgia and Florida, respectively, who pushed to strip supplemental funding for FEMA in September—right at the start of hurricane season.

Here is a partial list of Trump's questionable actions on disaster aid, in addition to his politicization of California wildfires:

• Trump diverted over $150 million in FEMA disaster funds ahead of Hurricane Dorian, which hit the Southeast, to the border—exactly what he falsely accused Biden of doing.

• He rolled back flooding standards intended to prevent the very kind of devastation currently being seen in Western North Carolina and other parts of the South in order to benefit his wealthy donors.

• He threatened to veto legislation providing nearly $5 billion in disaster relief funding after extreme earthquakes.

• He dangled federal aid for Michigan over his opposition to the state’s mail-in ballot program.

• He called for cuts to numerous programs that help prepare, manage, and mitigate wildfires.

• He proposed budget cuts to NOAA that would have left the US unprepared for extreme weather.

Then, of course, were the controversies that put Trump’s incompetence on full display, such as when Trump, during Hurricane Dorian in 2019, said that "South Carolina, North Carolina, Georgia, and Alabama will most likely be hit (much) harder than anticipated." No weather forecaster had predicted that Dorian would impact Alabama, and eight National Hurricane Center forecast updates over the preceding 24 hours showed Dorian steering well away from Alabama and moving up the Atlantic coast.

This forced the National Weather Service to issue a tweet contradicting Trump’s claim, noting that Alabama “will NOT see any impacts from Dorian.” Despite it not being true, Trump continued to insist that the storm threatened Alabama, even after it passed beyond the state. When he was fact-checked by a reporter, he lashed out at the fact-check as “phony.” Later, Trump, in the Oval Office, displayed a large map depicting the storm’s path, which curiously had a black curve extending out from the path showing the storm. This newly added section, thought to be added by a Sharpie marker to massage Trump’s ego, inaccurately added to the storm’s path a section that covered parts of Alabama. Trump denied knowing how the map came to be modified. The incident quickly came to be known as “Sharpiegate.”

During Hurricane Florence in 2018, Donald Trump remarked that the storm was “one of the wettest we've ever seen, from the standpoint of water,” a remark that resulted in a great deal of ridicule directed his way.

Harris-Walz 2024 Spokesperson Sarafina Chitika released a statement this week regarding Trump’s politicization of disaster recovery efforts: “As president, Donald Trump gutted FEMA, blocked disaster relief, rolled back flooding standards to benefit his wealthy donors, and made crisis after crisis about himself instead of keeping Americans safe,” “A Trump victory this November is a disaster waiting to happen.”