Former President Donald Trump has been very busy misleading the American public about Hurricane Helene and the recovery efforts coming from the federal government.
I wrote last week about Trump falsely claiming that Gov. Brian Kemp had not been able to reach President Joe Biden and the White House in the immediate aftermath of the hurricane. In truth, Kemp had spoken to Biden the night before, when Biden told the governor to call him directly with anything he needed.
Since then, Trump has written on Truth Social that Democrats in North Carolina were “going out of their way to not help people in Republican areas.” He also falsely claimed at a rally that people in North Carolina whose homes were washed away would get just $750 in recovery assistance, when the truth is FEMA has an entire program to house, rebuild, and support people after disasters, including Hurricane Helene.
With that kind of leadership at the top for Republicans right now, it’s not at all surprising that other Republicans are spreading their own conspiracies, too.
U.S. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene has posted so much nonsense about the origins of Hurricane Helene that it’s making her run-in with the Gazpacho police look like graduate-level course work.
“Climate change is the new COVID,” she wrote on X Monday. “Ask your government if the weather is manipulated or controlled. Did you ever give permission to them to do it? Are you paying for it? Of course you are.”
To be clear, Greene is accusing the federal government of a plot to send hurricanes to Republican areas of the Southeast to keep Trump supporters from voting in November — never mind that Asheville, Augusta, Tampa, and plenty of urban areas have been decimated and are also heavily Democratic.
Greene has also shared a TikTok video to her congressional feed from an account run by a woman claiming she’s debunking the federal government’s efforts to “debunk theirselves.” In a video about whether FEMA’s individual grant assistance program is actually a loan that will have to be paid back, she concludes that an application form with a line for a person’s contact information is highly suspicious, “It’s looking a little bit loan-ish to me.”
That kind of misinformation only hurts people who need that help the most.
The good news for Georgians, at least, is that Kemp is not following his fellow Republicans over the cliffs of insanity. When Kemp spoke to President Joe Biden last week, he said so at a news conference. And when the federal government initially declared just 11 of 90 counties as federal disaster areas for recovery, Kemp called the White House to tell them they needed to do more, which they have.
If future federal efforts are slow, incomplete or incompetent, we can expect Kemp to say that, too, but he told me that keeping recovery efforts away from partisan politics is essential. It takes an immense amount of confidence and discipline not to jump into the Trump echo chamber in an election year, but that’s the kind of leader Kemp has become.
Likewise, GOP Lt. Gov. Burt Jones, a staunch ally of Trump’s, told us on Tuesday’s Politically Georgia that he’s been working with Democratic U.S. Sen. Jon Ossoff to coordinate help for their shared constituents in South Georgia. Jones is a fierce partisan, but not in this case, and it’s good for Georgians to know help is available from the leaders there to provide it.
Above and beyond the immediate recovery efforts, Georgia’s leaders also have to get serious about preparing the state for increasingly violent storms battering the state — not just rushing to respond to disasters once they’ve done their damage.
The AJC’s Adam Van Brimmer and Drew Kann have detailed those threats in a series about coastal residents’ scramble to adapt to rising tides and a coast that is literally sinking 1 to 2 inches per decade. And while that’s happening, Georgia business and farmers far from the coast are struggling to recover from one storm after another.
Recognizing the need, the General Assembly has created new House and Senate committees on resiliency, which had planned a field hearing in Savannah this week to discuss storm threats and the sea level rise that’s threatening cities from Tybee Island to Savannah, St. Marys and beyond. What could more clearly tell them that their work is urgent than the fact that the meeting had to be canceled because a second, more ferocious hurricane named Milton was barreling toward Florida?
The committees’ work is another place where partisan disaster politics can only hurt. Luckily, the bipartisan groups have been operating quietly out of view to conduct a serious inquiry about what’s needed for Georgians to weather the weather in the future.
Of course, the state still has to deal with first things first. As of Tuesday, thousands of Georgians are still without power and water after Hurricane Helene, which Georgia Power called the most destructive storm in its history. More people are flooded out of their homes, while farmers from South Georgia to South Carolina are fighting to salvage a harvest, if there’s anything to salvage at all.
And for for no reason other than partisan gamesmanship, they’re all having to navigate misinformation about whether their government is willing to help them get through the worst times of their lives. Georgians deserve so much better than this man-made disaster.
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