When two major hurricanes — Helene and Milton — pummeled the southeastern United States just weeks before the 2024 presidential election, there was little chance that the response to those back-to-back disasters would not become political.
Both President-elect Donald Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris attempted to spin the situation to their party’s advantage in the days that followed. Harris claimed that, if Trump were to be elected again, he would deny aid to states that did not vote for him in the fast-approaching election.
Trump suggested that the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) was slow-rolling relief efforts because some of the hardest-hit areas in western North Carolina and eastern Tennessee were deep red areas where he was very popular. The delayed relief, some feared, could even make it difficult for polling places in those areas to open — or for people whose lives had been turned upside-down to get to them even if they did.
As is their custom, legacy media outlets ignored the fact that Harris’ claims were entirely baseless — and if the past is prologue, demonstrably false: Trump was the one to send a floating hospital to New York City during the massive COVID spikes exacerbated by New York Democratic Governor Andrew Cuomo’s policies.
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Instead, they quickly harped on Trump, saying that there was no way a supposedly non-partisan federal agency like FEMA — which only exists to help people — would ever in a million years engage in the kind of behavior he was suggesting.
WATCH:
SUPERCUT!
Corporate media: FEMA would never politicize emergency response pic.twitter.com/uGDi8coEPS
— Tom Elliott (@tomselliott) November 11, 2024
But as The Daily Wire has since reported, denying aid to Trump supporters was not only happening in some of those hurricane-ravaged areas, it was considered to be “best practice” to simply avoid going to homes where Trump signs were displayed.
From that report:
A FEMA supervisor told workers in a message to “avoid homes advertising Trump” as they canvassed Lake Placid, Florida to identify residents who could qualify for federal aid, internal messages viewed by The Daily Wire reveal. The supervisor, Marn’i Washington, relayed this message both verbally and in a group chat used by the relief team, multiple government employees told The Daily Wire.
The government employees told The Daily Wire that at least 20 homes with Trump signs or flags were skipped from the end of October and into November due to the guidance, meaning they were not given the opportunity to qualify for FEMA assistance. Images shared with The Daily Wire show that houses were skipped over by the workers, who wrote in the government system messages such as: “Trump sign no entry per leadership.”
The employee responsible for giving that direction, according to the agency, has since been fired.
