There’s no let up in the war of words between President Biden and former President Trump over the federal government’s response to back-to-back devastating hurricanes that slammed into the southeast.
After Trump continued to charge that Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris have been slow and ineffective in steering the government’s storm efforts, the president once again fired back.
Biden told reporters on Thursday that Trump needed to “get a life man, help these people.”
And he argued that “the public will hold him [Trump] accountable” for making false claims regarding the capabilities of FEMA (Federal Emergency Management Agency) to assist storm victims.
BACK-TO-BACK HURRICANES ROCK PRESIDENTIAL RACE
President Joe Biden speaks and gives an update on the impact and the ongoing response to Hurricane Milton, in the South Court Auditorium on the White House complex in Washington, Thursday, Oct. 10, 2024. (AP Photo/Susan Walsh) (AP Photo/Susan Walsh)
But the former president’s son, Eric Trump, posted on X on Wednesday that the family has opened up one of its Florida hotels to house over 200 linemen who are helping in the storm’s aftermath.
Trump has also launched a GoFundMe campaign for victims of Hurricane Helene in Georgia, which has raised more than $7 million so far.
The president spoke as millions in Florida remained without power after Hurricane Milton tore a path of destruction across the central and northern parts of the state late Wednesday into Thursday.
Meanwhile, cleanup and recovery efforts continue across the southeast, which was hit hard by Helene nearly two weeks ago.
With less than four weeks to go until Election Day in November, Harris and Trump are locked in a narrow margin-of-error showdown in the race to succeed Biden in the White House, and with two of the hardest-hit states from Helene — North Carolina and Georgia — among the seven key battlegrounds that will likely determine the outcome of the 2024 election, the politics of federal disaster relief are again front and center on the campaign trail.
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“Vice President Harris and I have been in constant contact with the state and local officials. We’re offering everything they need,” Biden emphasized on Thursday.
Among those the president spoke with was Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida.
While DeSantis and Harris have traded verbal fire this week over whether he ignored hurricane-related calls from her, the governor and Biden have worked together on storm response and relief efforts.
“I spoke with the president this morning,” DeSantis said during one of his numerous briefings on Thursday. “He said he wants to be helpful. And so if we have a request, he said, send them his way, and he wants to help us get the job done. So I appreciate being able to collaborate across the federal, state and local governments and work together to put the people first.”
Despite those comments and others from DeSantis as well as other leading Republican officeholders in the storm-struck southeast, Trump has continuously slammed Biden and Harris.
DESANTIS AND HARRIS TRADE FIRE OVER HURRICANE CALL
“THE WORST RESPONSE TO A STORM OR HURRICANE DISASTER IN U.S. HISTORY,” Trump claimed in a social media post on Tuesday.
“The worst hurricane response since Katrina,” the former president charged on Wednesday as he pointed to the much-maligned initial federal response to Hurricane Katrina in 2005, which was heavily criticized for being slow and ineffective.
Trump, speaking at a campaign rally in battleground Pennsylvania, lobbed another political bomb at Harris, arguing that “She just led the worst rescue operation in history in North Carolina…the worst ever, they say.”
And the former president once again made false claims that FEMA diverted money intended for disaster relief and spent it on undocumented migrants in the U.S. as he turned up the volume on his inflammatory rhetoric over the combustible issue of illegal immigration.
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“You know where they gave the money to: illegal immigrants coming,” Trump said as the crowd of MAGA supporters loudly booed.
Hours later, Biden pushed back, accusing the Republican presidential nominee of leading an “onslaught of lies.”
Biden charged that the rhetoric from Trump and other Republicans was “beyond ridiculous” and that “it’s got to stop.”
But on Thursday at a campaign event in Michigan, Trump kept up the attacks. He praised southern Republican governors for doing a “fantastic job” reacting to the storms and argued that “the federal government, on the other hand, has not done what you’re supposed to be doing, in particular, with respect to North Carolina. They’ve let those people suffer unjustly, unjustly.”
Democratic presidential nominee Vice President Kamala Harris greets people who were impacted by Hurricane Helene in Augusta, Ga., Wednesday, Oct. 2, 2024, as Augusta Mayor Garnett Johnson watches at right. (AP Photo/Carolyn Kaster) (AP Photo/Carolyn Kaster)
Harris, in a Wednesday interview with the Weather Channel, also chided Trump.
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“This is not a time for us to just point fingers at each other as Americans,” the vice president said. “Anybody who considers themselves to be a leader should really be in the business right now of giving people a sense of confidence that we’re all working together and that we have the resources and the ability to work together on their behalf.”
Trump campaign national press secretary Karoline Leavitt, responding to the criticism, said in a statement to Fox News on Thursday, “is this the same Joe Biden who President Trump knocked out of the race with the most dominant debate performance in history? Maybe he should keep quiet and go back to the beach. President Trump has a great life and it entails working hard every day to save this country from the mess Biden and Kamala got us into.”
Fox News’ Kirill Clark and Matteo Cina contributed to this report
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