WASHINGTON ― After making political hay of a train derailment and a hurricane during his campaign to return to the White House, President Donald Trump since retaking office has failed to visit a single natural disaster site on his watch and has slow-walked aid to victims.
On Feb. 14, windstorms and torrential rains caused floods and mudslides in Kentucky and West Virginia, killing 25. Trump did not visit the affected communities, but did spend the following five days playing golf at his clubs in South Florida.
Exactly one month later, strong winds, tornadoes and wildfires wreaked havoc across Kansas, Oklahoma, Missouri, Arkansas and Mississippi, leaving 34 people dead. Trump again did not visit but instead spent that weekend at his course in West Palm Beach, Florida, and the following weekend at his club in Bedminster, New Jersey.
And on May 16, tornadoes and heavy rain again ravaged Missouri and Kentucky. This time, 25 people died, but again, Trump did not go to either state in the coming days — but did manage a round of golf at his course in Virginia that weekend, and at Bedminster the weekend after.
In all, close to 100 Americans have died in dozens of tornadoes, straight-line windstorms, floods and wildfires since Trump’s Jan. 20 inauguration. None has merited a presidential visit.
What’s more, he has reneged on promises he made to Tropical Storm Helene victims in North Carolina during the one trip he has made to sites of disasters that took place under his predecessor, Joe Biden.
“We’re going to get you the resources you need and the support that you deserve and we’ll be at your side through every step of the rebuilding,” he told residents of Swannanoa on Jan. 24. “The highest responsibility and deepest obligation of the American government is to protect its people and that’s never truer than in times of emergency like this.”
In the five months since, though, Trump and his administration have not delivered new aid, including billions specifically targeted for North Carolina in December’s spending bill, and has instead cut back on paying for the cleanup costs.
On May 22, the Federal Emergency Management Agency told North Carolina Gov. Josh Stein that his direct appeal to Trump asking for the federal government to continue paying 100% of cleanup costs was “not warranted.”
That denial and other proposed FEMA policy changes will cost the state and its local governments some $2 billion.
Trump’s White House did not respond to HuffPost queries about his choice not to visit sites of disasters on his watch. Instead, he has repeatedly pushed a plan to get rid of FEMA.
“We want to wean off of FEMA,” he told reporters again last week. “It’s extremely expensive and, again, when you have a tornado or a hurricane or you have a problem of any kind, in a state, that’s what you have governors for.”
“Trump undermined the Helene response in real time by spreading dangerous misinformation that scared good people out of getting the help they were owed, like money for fixing their homes,” said Andrew Bates, a former deputy press secretary in Biden’s White House and a North Carolina native. “Now Trump is stranding the same North Carolinians he hurt, especially in rural areas, by breaking his promise to fund the recovery.”
Politicizing disasters
While Trump has been abandoning disaster victims since taking office, he was actively pursuing them as he ramped up his run for president in 2023.
Indeed, Trump was able to win considerable media attention in February, just as the Republican primary campaign was starting, with a visit to East Palestine, Ohio, following the derailment of a train carrying industrial chemicals. He railed against Biden’s administration — even though both FEMA and the Environmental Protection Agency were on the ground within hours — and against Biden for not personally visiting.
“In too many cases, your goodness and perseverance were met with indifference and betrayal,” Trump told community leaders during his Feb. 22 trip, three weeks after the accident.
That strategy continued after he had wrapped up the nomination the following year. When then-Hurricane Helene hit Florida and then continued on a trail of destruction northward, Trump traveled to Valdosta, Georgia, where he took credit for supplies brought there by the private charity, Samaritan’s Purse. He continued to attack Biden, even as Republican Gov. Brian Kemp praised the administration for its prompt response.
But Trump’s most aggressive lying about that storm and its devastation was in North Carolina, where Trump accused Biden and FEMA of purposefully ignoring victims in the western part of the state because they were likely Trump voters.
“They have left Americans to drown in North Carolina, Georgia, Tennessee, Alabama, and elsewhere in the South,” he wrote in a Sept. 30 social media post.
Trump kept up those attacks even after the election was over and he had won. During his visit to Swannanoa in late January, Trump told his supporters: “You are treated very badly by the previous administration... Our government failed you, but it wasn’t the Trump government. It was a government run by Biden.”
Shifting burden to the states
That visit to North Carolina and — later that day, Los Angeles — remain the only disaster site visits by Trump since returning to office, despite dozens of new storms and fires that have almost exclusively hit states that voted for him. And even on that trip, Trump spent a total of 2 hours and 51 minutes in and around Asheville, 3 hours and 38 minutes in Los Angeles, but 46 hours and 5 minutes at his Doral golf resort in South Florida.
Trump, in fact, has played golf on 40 days, a full 27 percent of his 147 days in office to date, at a cost to taxpayers of $38.4 million, according to a HuffPost analysis. In addition, he has traveled to the Super Bowl, to the Daytona 500, to a number of kickboxing matches, and to events benefiting his for-profit business ventures, all on the taxpayer dime ― indicating that had he wanted to visit disaster sites, he had the time to do so.
It’s unclear why Trump has chosen not to visit the stricken communities, which, historically, has been one of the basic duties of being president.
Biden, for example, went to Houston, Texas, on Feb. 26, 2021, barely a month after taking office, to visit victims of a severe winter storm two weeks earlier. He was met there by Texas’ Republican governor, Greg Abbott. In July, he traveled to Surfside, Florida, where a condo building had collapsed. He went to New Jersey and New York City in September to see flooding from Hurricane Ida. In December, he flew to Kentucky following a spate of tornadoes. In those visits and others, he pledged federal aid to clean up and rebuild.
Trump, in contrast, has repeatedly expressed his desire to reduce the federal government’s role in recovering from natural disasters — a role that came into being because the costs are often too great for local communities and states to bear on their own.
Even during his trips to California and North Carolina on Jan. 24, Trump on multiple occasions mentioned his goal to dramatically “reform” FEMA or to eliminate it entirely.
“The FEMA people sort of left you high and dry, but we’re going to change that around. We’re not happy with FEMA,” he told supporters in Swannanoa.
Last week, Trump explained that state governors should be dealing with disasters, not the federal government.
“We’re moving it back to the states, so the governors can handle it. That’s why they’re governors. Now, if they can’t handle it, they shouldn’t be governor. But these governors can handle it. And they’ll work in conjunction with other governors,” he said.
For governors, even governors with strong ties to Trump, this new approach has left their states hurting and unable to pay for rebuilding following storms.
Arkansas Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders, a Republican who worked as Trump’s press secretary during his first administration, originally had her disaster aid request for the March 14 deadly tornadoes denied by FEMA. She eventually won a disaster declaration only after getting Trump on the phone on May 14.
Missouri Sen. Josh Hawley, also a Republican, said he had to push Trump repeatedly to win disaster declarations for the storms in March and is still working to get help for the tornadoes that ravaged the St. Louis area in May.
“This gets into a big issue that I’ve got with FEMA right now,” he told St. Louis Public Radio earlier this month. “What I discovered is they are slow-walking every disaster relief declaration from across the country.”
“Donald Trump cares so little about the Americans he promised to fight for that he’d rather spend time cheating at golf than helping victims of Helene,” Bates said. “However much money his businesses manage to steal from taxpayers, he’ll always be broke where it counts.”