Disaster politics: Trump, Harris are latest to deal with fallout

WASHINGTON – Another presidential election blown around by a hurricane.
In terms of politics, Vice President Kamala Harris and President Joe Biden are hoping that recovery from Hurricane Helene will resemble the federal government’s response to Hurricane Sandy in 2012 – a fairly smooth process that did credit to the last Democratic-led White House in a presidential election season.
Former President Donald Trump, meanwhile, is trying to turn the latest natural disaster to strike the U.S. during an election year into the Harris-Biden version of Hurricane Andrew in 1992 – a slow-and-sloppy response that sealed the political fate of defeated President George H.W. Bush.
“There’s nobody that’s handled a hurricane or storm worse than what they’re doing right now,” Trump said to supporters Thursday night in Saginaw, Michigan.
Trump’s indictment has included falsehoods – he claimed that federal disaster money went to migrants and that Georgia GOP Gov. Brian Kemp had trouble reaching Biden, but neither were the case – and the 2024 Republican nominee for the White House has been accused of playing politics with disaster relief during his presidency.
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During his tour of ravaged areas of Georgia, Florida, North Carolina, and South Carolina, Biden urged people to put politics aside, and try to help as many storm victims as they can.
“When you do that, I hope we begin to break down this rabid partisanship that exists,” Biden said during a visit to Ray City, Georgia. “I mean that sincerely. There’s no rationale for it.”
This election’s hurricane debate is particularly fierce in Georgia and North Carolina, storm-damaged swing states that are the recipients of candidate visits this week.
In Augusta, Georgia, Harris did not mention Trump by name, but told residents that “we are here for the long haul … 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.”
Disaster politics are a staple of presidential politics, from the post-world war flu epidemic of 1918-1920 to the start of the COVID pandemic in 2020.
After all, fall campaigns take place in the heart of flu season, although any disaster – and the government response to it – can change the shape of American politics.
During the Great Mississippi River Flood of 1927, President Calvin Coolidge appointed a prominent official to head up relief efforts: Commerce Secretary Herbert Hoover.
Already famous for food supplies to Belgium during the world war, Hoover rode flood relief all the way to the White House (where he eventually ran into an economic calamity known as the Great Depression, although that’s another story.)
President Lyndon Johnson created a template for modern presidents in 1965 when he traveled to Louisiana to survey the damage wrought by Hurricane Betsy. LBJ assumed personal control of recovery operations.
“Presidents – as chief executives and the only leaders selected by the entire country – are expected to take actions that will protect and help Americans,” said political scientist Lara Brown, author of “Jockeying for the American Presidency: The Political Opportunism of Aspirants.”
“When disasters occur,” she said, “Americans look to presidents to see how closely their promises of compassion, protection, and assistance match their deeds.”
The cautionary tale is President George Herbert Walker Bush.
Seeking re-election in 1992, Bush already faced trouble from a slumping economy and a fierce challenge from Democrat Bill Clinton.
Then came August and Hurricane Andrew, which smashed the southern coast of Florida.
In his biography of the elder Bush, historian Timothy Naftali wrote that “it took too many days for the U.S. government to respond adequately.”
Bush wound up losing a three-candidate election that included independent Ross Perot, although the incumbent Republican president did carry Florida (barely).
His son, Republican George W. Bush, took care to look on top of things when four hurricanes hit Florida in a six-week period during the 2004 hurricane season, another presidential election year.
The next year, after winning a second term, Bush suffered for a sloppy response to Hurricane Katrina, an example of what not to do.
In his memoir, Bush said his mistakes with the Katrina response added to existing burdens: “The aftermath of Katrina – combined with the collapse of Social Security reform and the drumbeat of violence in Iraq -made the fall of 2005 a damaging period in my presidency.”
Memories of Katrina are so vivid that Trump – not a fan of the Bush family – brought it up in his recent Michigan speech.
“A certain president, I will not name him, destroyed his reputation with Katrina,” Trump said in Saginaw.
Incumbent President Barack Obama fared better in October of 2012 when Hurricane Sandy gutted the New Jersey coast.
Obama promoted cooperation with New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, a prominent Republican, and the Democratic president sailed onto victory over GOP nominee Mitt Romney.
When Christie ran for president in 2016, Republicans criticized him for working with Obama. One primary opponent mocked the New Jersey governor by saying that “he was like a little boy: ’oh, I’m with the president.’”
“Remember, he flew in the helicopter and he was all excited,'” said that rival, then a New York businessman named Donald Trump. “I said, ‘I would have put you in my helicopter – it’s much nicer.’”
Mike DuHaime, a former aide to Christie, said voters in his home state of New Jersey loved Christie for working with Obama, and overwhelmingly re-elected him governor in 2014.
Republican presidential caucus and primary voters, however, “punished” Christie when he ran for president, DuHaime said, “as if somehow working with the federal government during the largest natural disaster in the history of the state was wrong.”
He added: “Somewhere along the line, compromise and bipartisanship became dirty words among the far right and far left.”
As Trump tries to criticize Harris and Biden over Hurricane Helene, some of his own former administration officials said he played politics with disaster relief while he was in the Oval Office.
Trump hesitated to provide disaster aid to areas he believed were Democratic leaning, including California as wildfires raged, said a report from Politico’s E&E News that cited interviews with a pair of ex-Trump aides.
Biden retweeted the article and said of its allegations: “You can’t only help those in need if they voted for you.”
“It’s the most basic part of being president, and this guy knows nothing about it,” the president added.
Trump campaign spokesman Steven Cheung called the story “fake news” that never happened. “None of this is true and is nothing more than a fabricated story from someone’s demented imagination,” Cheung told USA TODAY.
One of the former Trump administration officials cited by E&E News, Olivia Troye, told USA TODAY that “it was so frustrating to see Trump this week” attack others over disaster relief.
“We don’t look at disaster relief through a political lens,” Troye said.
Contributing: Joey Garrison