Former President Donald Trump is confident that his supporters in parts of the country ravaged by Hurricane Helene will make it to the polls on Election Day – “even if they have to crawl.”
“Republican areas got hit very hard,” the former president acknowledged in an interview with Fox News host Laura Ingraham that aired Monday.
“Many people are dead. They don’t even know what it’s going to be in terms of the number … hundreds are missing,” he added.
Despite the devastation, particularly in the swing state of North Carolina, Trump told Ingraham that he doesn’t foresee a scenario in which the storm’s effects keep his backers from voting.
“I believe they’re going to go out and vote if they have to crawl to a voting booth,” the 45th president said. “And that’s what’s happening.”
Trump noted that his daughter-in-law, Republican National Committee co-chair Lara Trump, is part of a team making sure voters get to the polls in places hit hard by Helene, which made landfall on Sept. 26 as a powerful Category 4 hurricane.
“Lara is working on it. Other people are working on it, and we’re trying to make it convenient for them – but they just lost their house,” he said. “We’re trying to make it convenient for them to go out and vote.”
Trump then suggested that the Harris-Biden administration’s response to the storm may actually help in the south.
“[W]e are doing very well in certain areas that we weren’t expected to do – Virginia, we’re doing well. We’re doing well all over. I think we’re going to do great in North Carolina, because the response has been so bad to the hurricane – this response has been horrific,” he argued.
President Biden claims the federal response to the hurricane has been “robust,” but Trump said he hasn’t witnessed that in his multiple visits to Georgia and North Carolina.
“He doesn’t know what robust is,” the former president said of the 81-year-old commander in chief. “He should be there. And [Vice President Kamala Harris] should be there. She shouldn’t be at fundraisers.”
“I’d have a tremendous team of people here,” Trump said of how he would’ve handled the after effects of the storm. “They don’t have any people here.”
“I was in North Carolina yesterday … they don’t have the people, and they’re complaining there’s no people around to help,” he claimed.
“I was there for the entire day, and I saw virtually nobody, other than the people who were badly affected,” Trump added.
Trump leads Harris by less than a percentage point in North Carolina, and he’s up by 1.5 points in Georgia, according to the latest RealClearPolitics average of polls.
