'Republicans are frauds': Reporter shreds Trump over hurricane relief 'lies'

A North Carolina-based reporter blasted former President Donald Trump on Thursday and said he has "lied" about Hurricane Helene relief efforts even as many are dead, dying or missing, and before communities even began to pick up the pieces.

Despite the extensive work of both FEMA and the National Guard to help the six affected states from Florida to Virginia, Trump has already declared the response a failure, saying Biden was "sleeping" even as governors in both parties confirmed the federal government was giving them all they needed, and even suggested with no evidence that the Biden administration and North Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper are "going out of their way to not help people in Republican areas."

"At least 202 people are dead across six states following Hurricane Helene, and no place was hit harder than North Carolina, where I’m from," wrote Billy Ball. "And at least 40 people around Asheville, the area’s largest city, died in the storm. Residents in hard-to-reach places desperately need food and water and medical supplies. It’s a tragedy in real time. You would think the partisan hacks would give it a rest while people are dead, dying, or missing. But folks out here were only spared the election gimmicks for about 100 hours."

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In perhaps the most shameless falsehood, noted Ball, Trump even "claimed Georgia’s Republican governor, Brian Kemp, couldn’t get Biden on the phone, but that was directly contradicted by Kemp just hours before."

Meanwhile, he noted, Trump-backed gubernatorial candidate Mark Robinson has made similar claims to try to distract from the latest scandal about a report that linked him to Nazi posts on a porn site. Robinson is the only state official who blew off voting for Cooper's emergency declaration.

The truth, said Ball, is that federal aid has come since Saturday, a day after the storm. President Joe Biden, responding to Gov. Roy Cooper’s request, issued a disaster declaration and hastened federal aid.

"Biden visited North Carolina Wednesday, and Cooper said he’d spoken with the president about using military assets at nearby Camp Lejeune and Fort Liberty to help out" — and "thousands of pounds of food and supplies" have been airlifted by the National Guard to affected communities, said Ball.

Trump's attacks are particularly notable, said Ball, given his track record of denying climate change, and his botched response after Hurricane Maria devastated Puerto Rico.

"These Republicans are frauds. They respond to emergencies like con artists and ambulance chasers, not like leaders," concluded Ball. "In times of crisis, some politicians are there to help and some are there to stand and talk. We’ve seen enough of Donald Trump and his MAGA allies to know which kind they are."