Minutes after touching down in storm-ravaged Valdosta, Ga., former President Donald J. Trump made an elaborate false claim about the Biden administration’s response to Hurricane Helene.
“The governor’s doing a very good job,” Mr. Trump said of the state’s Republican governor, Brian Kemp. The problem, the former president insisted, was that Mr. Kemp was “having a hard time getting the president on the phone.”
Mr. Trump, who wore a red “Make America Great Again” cap along with his trademark blue suit and long red tie, added: “I guess, uh, they’re not, they’re not being responsive. The federal government is not being responsive.”
But earlier on Monday, Mr. Kemp himself told a different story. He said that he and Mr. Biden had spoken the night before, and made clear he appreciated the president’s responsiveness.
“He just said, Hey, what do you need?” Mr. Kemp said. “And I told him, you know, we got what we need. We’ll work through the federal process.”
Mr. Kemp said that Mr. Biden offered “that if there’s other things we need, just to call him directly — which, I appreciate that.”
The anecdote from Mr. Trump was revealing less for its dishonesty than for what it highlighted about his approach to federal disaster relief. As president, he viewed federal aid through the prism of his personal politics, threatening to withhold money from governors of blue states whom he saw as enemies, and promising “A-plus” treatment for his allies.
The Trump administration proposed cutting the budget of the agency responsible for disaster relief, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, and his top officials diverted money away from FEMA to deal with immigration enforcement. FEMA was understaffed throughout Mr. Trump’s presidency and, until the coronavirus pandemic, he did not view the agency as a priority for funding. He instead viewed the Homeland Security Department, which oversees FEMA, solely as an immigration enforcement agency.
After Hurricane Maria struck Puerto Rico in September 2017, Mr. Trump told aides he wanted to block money from reaching the island because its leadership was corrupt. He also falsely claimed that the Puerto Rican authorities were inflating the hurricane’s death toll.
The most enduring images of Mr. Trump visiting the island after Maria were of him throwing paper towels at the island’s desperate residents, as if he were shooting free throws. Three years after the hurricane’s landfall, in September 2020, Mr. Trump said he would finally release $13 billion worth of aid for Puerto Rico. The announcement came less than two months before Election Day, as the Trump campaign was chasing Puerto Rican voters in Florida in what polls at the time suggested would be a competitive race in the state.
California was another state where the former president’s personal politics collided with the urgent need for federal relief. The 2018 wildfire season was the most destructive in California’s history. Mr. Trump — whose presidency the incoming Democratic governor, Gavin Newsom, had positioned himself as a bulwark against — reacted to the disaster by publicly attacking the state and threatening its relief funding.
In January 2019, Mr. Trump said he would withhold FEMA support from California if the state did not improve its forest management practices. “Billions of dollars are sent to the State of California for Forest fires that, with proper Forest Management, would never happen,” he wrote on what was then known as Twitter. “Unless they get their act together, which is unlikely, I have ordered FEMA to send no more money. It is a disgraceful situation in lives & money!”
The contentiousness over the fires did not end that season. After a phone call with Mr. Newsom in 2020, Mr. Trump ended up authorizing federal support for California that had initially been denied by the Trump administration. Mr. Newsom publicly thanked Mr. Trump for the approval of the money. But this year, Mr. Trump has again threatened to withhold disaster relief money from the state.
In comments this month at his golf course in Rancho Palos Verdes, Calif., Mr. Trump threatened Mr. Newsom over a lawsuit the state had filed against Trump-era rules that proposed to send more water to the state’s farmers.
“If he doesn’t sign those papers, we won’t give him money to put out all his fires,” Mr. Trump said, referring to Mr. Newsom as “Newscum.”
“And, if we don’t give him the money to put out his fires, he’s got problems,” Mr. Trump said. “He’s a lousy governor.”
Mr. Newsom, in a text message exchange, did not respond to a question about whether he had ever learned what freed up the money in 2020. But he recalled that Mr. Trump expected personal treatment before aid was sent after several natural disasters.
He was “publicly threatening, playing his politics — looking tough … forcing a call, a ‘transaction’ in his mind — reminding you in process who’s in control, why he matters,” Mr. Newsom wrote.
Sometimes, Representative Kevin McCarthy of California, then a top Republican leader in the House, would nudge Mr. Trump about disaster funding for the state, according to a person briefed on the matter who insisted on anonymity to discuss the private conversations.
Mr. Trump tended to treat his political allies with more respect and good will after disasters. When a tornado tore through Alabama in March 2019, he posted a message on Twitter promising the heavily pro-Trump state “A Plus treatment” from the federal government.
In a statement, a campaign spokeswoman, Karoline Leavitt, noted Mr. Trump’s visit to Georgia on Monday and said, “Neither Kamala Harris nor Joe Biden have showed up anywhere.” She accused Mr. Biden of showing “a total lack of leadership from the White House during times of crisis.”
Former administration officials, who insisted on anonymity to speak candidly about private discussions from their time working for the former president, said he sometimes treated disaster funding the way he tried to treat other streams of money in his government: a pot of cash for him to dole out as he saw fit, depending on how he personally was treated.
He also didn’t seem to understand — or want to understand — that some emergency funding was beyond his ability to curtail, according to one person with direct knowledge of the discussions. Another person with direct knowledge of the discussions said Mr. Trump wanted gracious requests from governors in order to help their states.
That was contrary to the process by which funding is supposed to be approved. It starts with the state’s governor, but as a request to FEMA, which then passes through the Office of Management and Budget and the National Security Council. From there, it passes to the White House staff secretary, and then to the president for what by then is perfunctory approval.
Mr. Trump made clear he wanted to receive personal gratitude from governors throughout his presidency, those people said, but especially during the coronavirus pandemic in 2020, when governors were competing against one another for scarce lifesaving equipment like ventilators and personal protective gear.
Yet some former officials said that behind the scenes, and away from cameras, Mr. Trump was sympathetic to people who had been affected by national disasters. Thomas P. Bossert, Mr. Trump’s first Homeland Security adviser, said it was reductive to conclude that Mr. Trump was blind to what the disaster relief agency did, or unconcerned with how it performed.
“I think it’s unfair,” Mr. Bossert said, adding that he believed he had helped Mr. Trump think differently about the agency.
“I think President Trump cared about the effects that those storms were having on the people, and maybe you can question his motives, maybe it was their votes or maybe it was their well-being,” he said, but he added that this didn’t change Mr. Trump’s behavior with members of the public. He said he thought the federal responses to Hurricane Maria and Hurricane Harvey, which hit Texas and Louisiana in August 2017, had been well managed.
Mr. Trump’s visit to South Georgia on Monday comes at a pivotal time in the presidential race, in which the state is important to his re-election prospects. In his remarks, the former president repeatedly said that he had come bearing gifts to help the disaster response: semitrailer trucks filled with relief supplies and a tanker of gas, distributed by the evangelical Christian humanitarian aid group Samaritan’s Purse.
Still, as he underlined his contributions to the storm response, and shortly before he repeated his false claim that Mr. Biden had been unreachable by phone, the former president said he would refrain from talking about the politics arching over his visit.
“When a crisis hits, when our fellow citizens cry out in need, none of that matters,” Mr. Trump said. “We’re not talking about politics now.”
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