Donald Trump has repeatedly pushed misinformation during natural disaster both as candidate and while in office, an in-depth review of his time in office revealed.
The former president has falsely claimed in recent days that the Biden administration cannot respond adequately to Hurricane Helene because it had used disaster funds for migrants, and he has dubiously said the president and vice president Kamala Harris' response had been "unbelievably weak," reported the Washington Post.
“Historically, hurricanes are a time where politicians like to put partisanship aside and show they’re focused on the greater good,” Alex Conant, a GOP strategist who worked in the George W. Bush White House during Hurricane Katrina, told the Post.
“Trump does not have that instinct at all and he’s so controversial that Democrats don’t have that instinct with him either.”
The Trump administration moved faster to help hurricane victims in Texas, which voted for him, than in Puerto Rico, which didn't, during 2017 storms, and he reportedly balked at providing disaster aid to California in 2018 until he was shown that Republican-leaning regions were affected by wildfires, and he also threatened to withhold funding from Michigan to clean up after floods in 2020 because he was angry with plans to send out absentee voting applications.
Just last month, Trump threatened to withhold federal aid from California, whose governor Gavin Newsom is a political rival, if he was re-elected to pressure the state to changes its water management policies.
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"Trump has for years mischaracterized wildfires, claiming that California wasn’t using enough water to fight fires and incorrectly blaming forest management for wildfires," McDaniel and LeVine reported in WAPO. "He has suggested fires could be prevented by raking forest floors, cast doubt on climate change science in one 2020 meeting with state officials, and suggested that California should wet its forests. All are claims that scientists say show a misunderstanding of how fires spread and are fought."
Then there's his infamous doctoring of a hurricane map in 2019 with a Sharpie marker to make it look like a storm was headed toward Alabama, as he had inaccurately claimed, and the White House was later found by the Commerce Department inspector general to have pressured the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration to back up his false claims and discredit Weather Service meteorologists.
“Getting politics out of disasters and emergency management is really critical,” said Tim Frazier, faculty director of the emergency and disaster management program at Georgetown University. “It’s dangerous, it doesn’t help, and it certainly makes the job of our disaster responders, our first responders, more difficult.”