When Donald Trump was in the White House, pretending to "make America great again," he blocked aid to California after 2018 wildfires because he thought the victims hadn’t voted for him.
Politico’s E&E News got the scoop from Mark Harvey, Trump’s senior director for resilience policy on the National Security Council staff. Trump White House former Homeland Security adviser, Olivia Troye, confirmed it:
Harvey said Trump changed his mind after Harvey pulled voting results to show him that heavily damaged Orange County, California, had more Trump supporters than the entire state of Iowa.
“We went as far as looking up how many votes he got in those impacted areas … to show him these are people who voted for you,” said Harvey, who recently endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris alongside more than 100 other Republican former national security officials.
E&E News documented three other incidents in which Trump viewed disaster relief as a punishment or favor, depending on the loyalty of the recipients. Inspectors general of the Homeland Security and Housing and Urban Development departments found Trump’s FEMA delayed and mismanaged aid to Puerto Rico in the wake of Hurricane Maria.
Harvey, the former Trump special assistant, remembers trying to push Trump to get money out the door to Puerto Rico.
“It was very much a business deal, like, ‘This a lot of money. What are we getting in return for it?’” Harvey said. “There was still just a whole lot of stall, stall, stall, don’t give them what they need yet.”
“It just goes into this pattern of, ‘We’re not awarding that, these aren’t my people.’ That general sense of, ‘I am here to help my people, and these aren’t my people, so I don’t have a responsibility to help.’”
But when it came to helping Alabama tornado victims and hurricane victims in the Florida panhandle, i.e. likely Repubicans, Trump could not have been more eager to help.
It appears that more public-spirited government employees interfered with Trump’s corrupt desires. Or maybe the lazy, ignorant Trump didn’t care enough in most cases. E&E News found that Trump approved 89 disasters in states that opposed him and denied more than 80% of disaster requests from governors of states he won in 2016.
But there’s every reason to believe that politicization of disaster relief will be a much bigger feature of a second Trump administration. Project 2025, the Trump-cronies’ plan to quickly transform the government into a MAGA autocracy, also aims to purge the federal government and remake it with MAGA loyalists.
Trump’s latest disaster narcissism is to falsely accuse the Biden administration of ignoring the needs of Republican victims of Hurricane Helene.
As usual, every accusation is a projection and an admission coming from this disaster of a former president and a person.
