As Trump makes false claims about hurricane relief, White House calls it ‘poison’

Former president Donald Trump will appear Friday in Georgia, one of the states hardest-hit by Hurricane Helene, after spending the week falsely telling voters that the U.S. government is unable to fund the disaster response — claims the White House slammed in a memo as “poison.”

Without naming Trump, the Biden administration on Friday said Republicans are spreading “bald-faced lies” about the hurricane response and are “using Hurricane Helene to lie and divide us.”

The White House memo came the day after the Federal Emergency Management Agency launched a tool to dispel rumors about the disaster response that was clearly aimed at countering Trump’s claims. The memo said the falsehoods could keep hurricane victims from seeking the assistance they critically need.

“It is paramount that every leader, whatever their political beliefs, stops spreading this poison,” White House spokesman Andrew Bates wrote in the memo, adding: “This isn’t about politics — it’s about helping people.”

In a statement to The Washington Post, Trump spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt repeated the claim, without providing evidence, that the federal government had no funding, and made the accusation that Vice President Kamala Harris, Trump’s Democratic rival for the presidency, “stole” money from FEMA, which handles disaster relief. Leavitt said Trump “is leading during this tragic moment.”

The Harris campaign said in a statement Friday that Trump’s presidential record included “gutting FEMA, blocking critical disaster relief, and making crisis after crisis about himself while leaving hard-working Americans on their own.”

With one month to Election Day, Trump has focused on whipping up public dissatisfaction with the Biden administration — and tying Harris to a disaster response he describes as a mess. Among Trump’s claims has been that the disaster response was affected by immigration: In a Thursday speech, Trump inaccurately said that those affected by the hurricane are getting “no help” because the federal government has instead spent its money “on people that should not be in our country.”

“There’s nobody that’s handled a hurricane or storm worse than what they’re doing right now,” Trump said at the rally. “Kamala has spent all her FEMA money, billions of dollars, on housing for illegal migrants.”

As president, Trump diverted nearly $10 million in funding from FEMA to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement to use for detention programs in 2018.

Harris does not disburse FEMA funding as vice president. The claim about using disaster relief funding to house immigrants is false, and FEMA has the funds needed to respond to Helene, Bates said in the White House memo. The agency has processed $45 million in direct assistance to people affected by Helene so far, the White House said.

“No disaster relief funding at all was used to support migrants housing and services,” the memo states. “None. At. All.”

Hurricane Helene swept across several Southern states last week, devastating large areas and killing at least 213 people. It was one of the biggest storms to strike the Gulf Coast in decades and one of the deadliest hurricanes in modern times, and it has left behind a challenging aftermath — dismantled homes, destroyed water supplies, cut-off and wiped-out towns.

It will require a massive governmental response and probably a lengthy recovery. Disaster responses are often complex, and legitimate complains typically crop up.

Trump is scheduled to appear Friday in two of the states that were pummeled by the hurricane. He has focused largely on Georgia and North Carolina, two battleground states that could be key to taking him to victory.

In Georgia, he is set to appear alongside Gov. Brian Kemp (R) in their first joint appearance since 2020. The former president has repeatedly disparaged Kemp since he refused to interfere with Georgia’s 2020 election results. Later Friday, Trump is scheduled to hold a town hall in North Carolina, another hard-hit state.

This week, Trump falsely claimed that President Joe Biden had not spoken to Kemp about the disaster. The governor has expressed gratitude for the Biden administration’s response to the storm while also asking for more aid. Trump also claimed on his Truth Social platform that North Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper (D) was withholding aid from areas where Republicans live.

Cooper spokesman Fred Port said the governor is “very concerned about the impacts of misinformation,” adding: “This is a situation where we need a high degree of coordination and people working together. Confusion can be harmful.”

While FEMA, like other government agencies, has long struggled with funding issues and sometimes draws frustration from communities after disasters, those problems are unrelated to immigration.

Trump has appeared to pull from the same playbook he used during the 2023 train derailment in East Palestine, Ohio, where he attempted to set the crisis up as a political showdown with Biden and undermine confidence in the federal government’s ability to respond.

Then, he blasted Biden for not visiting the town sooner, as he has done with Harris about Helene, and he cast the federal government as unresponsive even though the state’s Republican governor had spoken to Biden and had not made any requests of him.

On Thursday morning, Trump falsely said on Truth Social that Biden and Harris were “universally” being criticized for the hurricane response. Republican governors, including in Georgia, Tennessee and Virginia, have said the federal response was quick.

“It’s been superb,” South Carolina Gov. Henry McMaster (R) said of the federal response, noting that he had talked to Biden, the transportation secretary and the FEMA administrator. “We’re getting assistance, and we’re asking for everything we need.”

White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said Monday that aid and search-and-rescue operations were underway in the affected areas — it “doesn’t matter if it’s a red state or blue state.”

Trump also baselessly claimed that Hurricane Helene was the “WORST & MOST INCOMPETENTLY MANAGED ‘STORM,’ AT THE FEDERAL LEVEL, EVER SEEN BEFORE.”

When he was president, Trump came under fire for how he handled some storms. His administration withheld $20 billion in disaster recovery funds for Puerto Rico after the deadly hurricanes Irma and Maria and then blocked a federal investigation into why those funds had not been released, the Department of Housing and Urban Development’s inspector general found.

A Politico investigation found that Trump and his allies responded more aggressively to help hurricane victims in the conservative state of Texas than in the Spanish-speaking territory of Puerto Rico. On Thursday, Politico reported that Trump also reportedly refused to approve disaster aid for California wildfires until he was shown that an area that voted for him was affected.

Project 2025, the road map for a second Trump administration, says that FEMA should cover fewer of the costs of disasters. It also proposes privatizing the federal weather agencies that predict hurricanes and other extreme events, where most people get their information when a storm is barreling toward their hometown. Trump has tried to distance himself from Project 2025, despite many of his allies’ having contributed to its creation.

This article will be updated.