First came the hurricanes. Then came the whirlwind of derision and disinformation — all aimed at the Biden administration by former President Donald Trump.
Over the last two weeks, Trump has used the twin disasters of hurricanes Helene and Milton to hammer President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris for their handling of the storms.
The attacks track with how Trump has approached politics since he burst onto the scene nearly a decade ago, weaving together personal insults with half-truths and outright lies.
But his focus on the storms — and the way he’s used them as a political cudgel — has morphed into one of Trump’s closing arguments in the final stretch of the 2024 presidential campaign.
“Western North Carolina, and the whole state, for that matter, has been totally and incompetently mismanaged by Harris/Biden,” Trump wrote on his Truth Social platform in the aftermath of Hurricane Helene’s rampage through the southeastern United States.
“They can’t get anything done properly, but I will make up for lost time, and do it right, when I get there,” he added. “Hold on, and vote these horrible ‘public servants’ out of office. They are incapable of doing the job.”
Criticizing elected leaders for mishandling disasters isn’t anything new. President George W. Bush, for example, was widely panned for his administration’s response to Hurricane Katrina in 2005.
But the way Trump has deployed the storms on the campaign trail takes it to a different level. Instead of calls for unity, Trump has tried to use the disasters to incite anger against the Biden administration and rally supporters to his side.
And one of Trump’s powerful tools — and potentially one of his most dangerous — is how he’s spreading conspiracy theories and false claims to do it. On Thursday, Biden said FEMA workers responding to Hurricane Helene had received death threats due to all the misinformation.
Most of Trump’s attacks have centered on Helene, which killed at least 230 people and likely caused tens of billions of dollars in damages.
More than 8,000 federal workers have been called upon to support the response effort, according to FEMA. And as of Wednesday, $344 million in disaster aid had reached 370,000 households.
But Trump breezed past those contributions Wednesday as he took aim at both the Biden administration and Harris, his chief rival in the presidential race.
“It was disgraceful what they did,” Trump said at a rally in Reading, Pennsylvania. “She didn’t send anything or anyone at all. Days passed. No help as men, women and children drowned.”
The accusation builds on a separate line of attack Trump pursued right after the storm. He said without evidence that the Biden administration — and North Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper (D) — were “going out of their way to not help people in Republican areas” affected by Hurricane Helene.
Migrants have played a starring role in Trump’s lies.
FEMA has spent $9 billion of its $20 billion annual budget in just eight days, and the agency soon could restrict spending unless Congress approves more. But Trump falsely accused FEMA of running out of money after steering the funding to undocumented immigrants instead of disaster survivors.
“The worst [hurricane response] ever, they say. They had no money. You know where they gave the money? To illegal immigrants coming in, many of whom are killers,” Trump said at a Wednesday rally in Scranton, Pennsylvania. “They’re dumping them in our country, because they think we have stupid people leading our country. And on that, I agree with them.”
That’s the latest in a pattern of Trump blending misinformation with xenophobia and racism.
When Harris ascended to the top of the Democratic ticket, Trump responded by falsely accusing the vice president of not identifying as Black until it would politically benefit her. In September, he baselessly accused Haitian immigrants of eating pets in Ohio, leading to bomb threats that shuttered schools as local and state GOP officials called for calm.
At least one Republican critic of Trump — outgoing Utah Sen. Mitt Romney — drew a connection between the former president’s falsehoods.
“Trump told us that people in Springfield are eating dogs and cats. He likewise said that FEMA money, our emergency money, instead of helping people that were hit by the hurricane is being used to help illegals,” Romney said Tuesday at the University of Utah. “I mean, he just makes it up.”
Ohio Sen. JD Vance, the GOP vice presidential nominee, has defended the pet-eating rhetoric as, alternately, a “created” story and one that came from his constituents. No incidents have been cited.
After Hurricane Helene, Trump likewise amplified conspiracy theories spreading over social media.
Hundreds of volunteer helicopter missions each day have ferried supplies and survivors through remote areas cut off by hurricane damage. Though federal authorities imposed some flight restrictions after the hurricane, especially in areas with heavy air traffic, the air space has remained open to air lifts.
“Kamala didn’t send any helicopters to rescue them,” Trump said. “And when people sent helicopters, they turned them back.”
Trump largely has focused his claims on North Carolina, which has a Democratic governor — Cooper — instead of Georgia or Florida, where Republican governors are in charge.
Vance has done the same. In a Wall Street Journal opinion piece published Tuesday, Vance falsely claimed Hurricane Helene was the deadliest U.S. storm since Katrina. In fact, Hurricane Maria killed far more people than Helene, about 3,000, when Trump was president.
“President Trump and I are realists,” Vance wrote. “We know there’s no perfect disaster recovery and that a storm like Helene will bring hardship to American towns no matter how well the government responds. But this wasn’t the response that the people of Western North Carolina deserved.”
FEMA has held multiple press briefings to combat the disinformation, and it put out a fact-checking website to dispute the false claims. On Tuesday, FEMA Administrator Deanne Criswell said the conspiracy theories were “absolutely the worst I have ever seen” and noted they were impeding recovery work.
She said storm victims had been left confused by the attacks and that some were hesitant to register for aid as a result.
The Trump campaign pushed back on the idea it was spreading falsehoods.
“The only misinformation is coming from the Harris-Biden Administration,” Trump campaign spokesperson Caroline Sunshine said in response to questions.
“If [Trump] were in office today, the federal government would be moving at a business speed, not a bureaucratic speed, like we are unfortunately seeing happen under Kamala Harris and Joe Biden right now and lives have been lost because of it,” Sunshine said.
In the immediate aftermath of Hurricane Helene, the Biden administration and the Harris campaign largely ignored the attacks and disinformation. But in recent days, they have responded with more force.
“Former President Trump has led the onslaught of lies,” Biden told reporters Wednesday, adding, “it’s beyond ridiculous, it’s got to stop, in moments like this there are no red or blue states, there’s one United States of America, where neighbors are helping neighbors.”
During a Wednesday interview on CNN, Harris described Trump’s rhetoric as “unconscionable.”
“The last thing that people deserve is a so-called leader misleading them and making them afraid of seeking help,” she said.
At a rally in Pittsburgh on Thursday night, former President Barack Obama told the crowd that Trump’s divisive political style was harming the country.
“Having people divided and angry, he figures, boosts his chances of getting elected,” Obama said. “And he doesn’t care who gets hurt.”
Some Republicans are pushing back too — especially in the states hit hardest by the storms.
Those Republicans aren’t crossing Trump, whose grip on the party remains ironclad. Instead, they’re denouncing others who are spreading falsehoods.
“Be careful about the nonsense that gets circulated,” Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) said at a Wednesday press conference, after his staff had started pushing back on social media posts that falsely claimed FEMA would block evacuees from returning home.
Rather than blame Trump — whom DeSantis challenged for the Republican presidential nomination before endorsing him — the governor pointed to bad actors who spread misinformation for profit, rather than political gain.
“Just know that the more titillating it is, the more likely somebody is making money off it,” DeSantis said. “And they don’t really give a damn about the wellbeing and the safety of the people that are actually in the eye of this storm.”
The rebukes haven’t been universal.
Some Republicans are promoting Trump’s conspiracy theories while adding their own. That includes Trump ally, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia, who wrote on X that “they can control the weather” because some Republicans were harmed by the storms. Greene did not specify who she meant by “they.”
With less than a month before Election Day, it remains to be seen whether Trump’s attacks help or hurt his efforts to win the White House.
Voters often don’t reward the federal government for doing its job, so Harris and Biden can only lose if there are any missteps by FEMA or other federal agencies, said Alex Conant, a GOP strategist who worked in Bush’s White House during the Katrina response. But at the same time, Trump’s strategy to insert himself into disaster response is “pretty risky,” he said.
“Trump is inserting controversy into this,” he said. “That turns off the independents and moderate voters who like his policies but don’t like the constant drama.”
But Trump’s hurricane misinformation thrives in an online environment where conspiracy theories can spread quickly, said Imran Ahmed, CEO of the Center for Countering Digital Hate.
And it intersects with two other overlapping groups: climate deniers, who traffic in conspiracy theories as a way to diminish the urgency of climate policy in response to extreme weather; and apolitical actors who see any news event as an opportunity to build their own clout.
“In the same way a superstorm is the nexus of a series of weather fronts,” he said, “what you have [here] is a superstorm of disinformation driven by different factors, which are cohering into a single event.”
