When former President Donald Trump traveled to Valdosta, Ga., today, he seemed to want to project the image of a leader in command amid the devastation of Hurricane Helene.
He had truckloads of “things,” he said. He had spoken to the Federal Emergency Management Agency, or FEMA, he said. He had even talked with Elon Musk, he said, about getting satellite internet “hooked up” after a storm that has knocked out power and connectivity to hundreds of thousands of people. (A White House spokesman said in a post on X that the deployment of such systems was “already happening.”)
Trump’s words there were vague and, at times, false. Still, he seemed to be hoping to draw comparisons to Barack Obama, then the president, who was widely praised for his handling of the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy in 2012 — and not to, well, himself after Hurricane Maria ravaged Puerto Rico in 2017, when he tossed paper towels to residents of a U.S. territory where many said they had been roundly ignored.
“A lot of people have been lost in this terrible, this terrible storm, this terrible hurricane,” Trump said Monday, before asking the assembled dignitaries to join him in a moment of “silence and prayer.”
Hurricane Helene roared ashore in Florida on Friday night, soaked parts of the Southeast and unleashed deadly flooding and mudslides across western North Carolina, with a death toll that has already topped 100 people across six states. The full extent of the devastation is only just emerging, and it can seem inappropriate to focus on politics when people are battling for survival.
The fact is, though, that the politics of disaster have loomed large in several recent elections — and, after Hurricane Helene barreled through two swing states, 2024 may be no different.
Over the weekend, Trump, a former president who has long downplayed climate change, sought to seize on the disaster for his own political benefit. He attacked President Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris for not immediately visiting the storm’s path of destruction. Harris cut short a Southwestern campaign swing where she was holding rallies and fund-raisers and traveled back to Washington, while Biden said he planned to visit the region on Wednesday.
Big storms before elections are a real-time test of how would-be — or incumbent — leaders handle a crisis. Hurricane Helene could draw renewed attention to Trump’s mixed record of natural disaster management, which included his threats to withhold aid from leaders of blue states, proposals by his administration to cut FEMA’s budget, and the diversion of funds from FEMA to immigration enforcement. It could also test Harris’s disaster management skills.
“There’s a long line of political graveyards of people who did not do a good job in a crisis,” former Gov. Pat McCrory of North Carolina, a Republican who was leading his state when Hurricane Matthew flooded swaths of eastern North Carolina in October 2016, told me. “There’s also a long line of success stories, too.”
When storms and elections collide
Hurricane season and election season often coincide. In 2008, Senator John McCain of Arizona, then the Republican presidential nominee, canceled most of the programming on the first day of the Republican National Convention as Hurricane Gustav bore down on the Gulf Coast, three years after President George W. Bush had been widely criticized for botching the response to Hurricane Katrina.
Obama visited New Jersey two days after Hurricane Sandy deluged New York and New Jersey, where he was showered with praise by Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey, a Republican. A last-minute polling bump — and a re-election victory — followed.
Recent days have shown Trump and Harris diverge in their handling of the moment at a critical time.
At a rally this weekend, Trump sought to use the hurricane to attack Harris, suggesting she should not have been holding fund-raisers over the weekend while parts of the country had been “devastated” by the hurricane.
Then, on Monday, he headed to Valdosta to speak to the press at a furniture store called Chez What that was damaged in the hurricane and had loose bricks piled around its facade. Trump eschewed the hurricane apparel — there were no tall rubber boots, a la Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, nor an Obama-esque windbreaker — and stuck with his standard campaign ensemble of dark suit, red tie and MAGA hat, which made the event seem blatantly political even as he insisted it was not.
“We’re not talking about politics now,” Trump said, moments before Franklin Graham, an evangelist who has been deeply supportive of the former president, directly evoked politics in a prayer.
“We pray that, as we come to this election, that your will be done,” Graham said.
A visit ‘as soon as possible’
Harris took a lower-key approach to the hurricane on Monday, making a quick appearance at FEMA’s headquarters where she tried to turn the applause of the employees there back on them.
“We will do everything in our power to help communities respond and recover,” said Harris, before telling the press she planned to visit the affected region “as soon as possible without disrupting any emergency response operations, because that must be the highest priority and the first order of business.”
McCrory said that politicians who visit disaster zones have to walk a “very fine line.”
“You need to show empathy and you can’t get in the way, and you better be successful in walking that line while visiting,” he said.
In 2016, when Hurricane Matthew bore down on McCrory’s state just before the presidential election, I was on the ground covering the damage for The New York Times. I remember thinking that politics and the presidential election could not have seemed further away.
“Anyone who’s thinking about the politics of the moment will fail if they’re the ones in charge,” McCrory said, adding that the people in harm’s way won’t hear any of the news conferences delivered by politicians.
A different kind of political theater
We’re in the final stages of a dramatic election year, and literal dramas are getting in on the action. My colleague Michael Paulson, who covers theater, reported that a play about the Constitution — and a farce about the presidency — are among the most-staged productions this year.
You might think America’s theaters would be leaning away from politics — counterprogramming, as it were — given the fatigue some people are feeling with the never-ending news cycle. And sure, some are.
But it turns out, according to a survey released last week by American Theater magazine, that the most popular play on the nation’s stages this season will be “What the Constitution Means to Me,” a play by Heidi Schreck that uses a high school speech competition as a way to explore how one of the country’s foundational documents has affected women over the years. The play ran on Broadway in 2019, toured, and streamed on Amazon, and now, for the second year in a row, it’s being staged more than any other play in regional theaters.
Why is this happening? I called Stephanie Lynge, the artistic director of the Hippodrome Theater in Gainesville, Fla., where the play is now in rehearsals and begins performances Oct. 9.
She said her theater’s selection committee unanimously chose the play back in January, thinking it would be perfect for an election year. That Florida now has an abortion rights measure on its ballot made the production all the more timely.
“Women’s rights have taken some blows, and the interpretation of the Constitution has been changing, and having a conversation about that is worthwhile and interesting,” Lynge said. “This is what theater does when it’s doing its best.”
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