Sickening Report Reveals How Trump Played Politics With Disaster Aid

Donald Trump’s attempt to politicize the devastation left by Hurricane Helene isn’t the first time he’s tried to exploit a natural disaster. While he was president, Trump was hesitant to send aid to areas where people voted against him, such as wildfire-stricken California, according to two former White House staffers.

E&E News spoke to Mark Harvey, Trump’s senior director for resilience policy on the National Security Council, who said that Trump didn’t want to send wildfire aid to California in 2018 because the state voted Democratic. But after Harvey showed him voting data from Orange County, California, showing more Trump supporters there than in all of Iowa, Trump changed his mind.

“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,” Harvey, who recently endorsed Kamala Harris along with other GOP national security figures, told E&E News.

Former White House Homeland Security adviser Oliva Troye concurred, saying that she would field calls from local politicians around the country asking for disaster relief because Trump refused to provide aid, leading her to frequently ask Vice President Mike Pence to pressure the president. She warned that Trump will play politics with disaster aid again if he returns to the White House.

“It’s not going to be about that American voter out there who isn’t even really paying attention to politics, and their house is gone, and the president of the United States is judging them for how they voted, and they didn’t even vote,” Troye said.

Trump eagerly sent aid to Florida in 2019 after Hurricane Michael hit the state’s Panhandle, according to Florida Governor Ron DeSantis’s autobiography, The Courage to Be Free. “They love me in the Panhandle,” Trump told DeSantis after he asked for federal assistance.

“I must have won 90 percent of the vote out there. Huge crowds. What do they need?” Trump asked, before directing FEMA to pay 100 percent of the state’s disaster costs. The emergency management agency ended up paying about $350 million more than it would have without Trump’s directive. In contrast, Trump only months earlier threatened to veto a bill in Congress that would have paid 100 percent of the disaster costs in the U.S. Virgin Islands and Puerto Rico after Hurricane Maria.

Since Hurricane Helene hit the American Southeast, Trump has pushed conspiracy theories that Democrats are neglecting Republican areas hit hard by the storm, doubling down after being called out. Even Republican politicians, like Georgia Governor Brian Kemp, are pushing back against him. But as is often the case with Trump, every accusation is just a confession.

Ta-Nehisi Coates perfectly dismantled the Democratic Party’s blatant hypocrisy in denying requests for a Palestinian American speaker to address the Democratic National Convention in August.

During an interview Monday night with MSNBC’s Ayman Mohyeldin at the Apollo Theater in New York, Coates criticized the Democratic Party for refusing to agree to requests from the Uncommitted Movement.

Coates took particular issue with the Democratic Party touting the names of activists like Fanny Lou Hamer and Shirley Chisolm but balking at demands for inclusivity.

“And then I’m like, right, but who’s not onstage?” Coates said, as the audience applauded. “Who’s been pushed out of the frame?”

“And I’m hearing all of this talk about, you know, ‘woman’s right to choose’ and protecting the autonomy of women’s bodies, and yet I see onstage some of the very people who have put that autonomy in question,” Coates said.

The DNC’s lineup had included several Republican lawmakers and politicians, including Donald Trump’s former White House press secretary Stephanie Grisham, conservative talk show host Ana Navarro, and former Illinois Representative Adam Kinzinger. In general, Kamala Harris’s campaign has made significant efforts to attract GOP and independent voters, aligning with voices such as former Republican Vice President Dick Cheney, a key architect of the Iraq War.

Harris is scheduled to appear with Cheney’s daughter, former Wyoming Republican Representative Liz Cheney, in Ripon, Wisconsin, the birthplace of the Republican Party Thursday, as part of that outreach to GOP and independent voters.

Coates described what it was like to join delegates from the Uncommitted Movement, who began a sit-in outside the convention center after their requests to have a speaker were denied. The award-winning author said that when he saw members of the Central Park Five addressing the convention, it sparked a thought.

“What I know is that when they were going through their stuff, the Democratic Party wanted nothing to do with them,” Coates said of the five.

“They were dehumanized. They were pushed out of the frame,” he continued. “And I’m standing with people who have been pushed out the frame! You know what I mean? And I’m with people whose families are being bombed literally right now! Right now!”

Coates questioned how seriously one could take U.S. and Israeli promises of “Never Again,” while simultaneously funding and conducting a massive military operation in Gaza that has reportedly killed more than 41,500 Palestinians, including at least 16,500 children.

“We ought to hold folks accountable. Like I just, I don’t believe that you get to take Shirley Chisolm, I don’t believe you get to take Fanny Lou Hamer, and then bankroll those bombs to be dropped on people,” Coates said.

Hamer testified before the DNC credentials committee in 1964 to challenge the seating of Mississippi’s all-white delegation to the convention, and advocated for the racially integrated Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party to have access to the national stage.

“If the Freedom Democratic Party is not seated now, I question America,” Hamer told the credentials committee. “Is this America, the land of the free and the home of the brave, where we have to sleep with our telephones off of the hooks, because our lives be threatened daily, because we want to live as decent human beings, in America?”

Donald Trump won’t release even basic medical details about himself ahead of next month’s presidential election, leaving the public to wonder if he’s hiding anything.

Trump promised last month that he would “very gladly” release his medical records, noting that he recently had a medical exam. But when The New York Times asked him for a copy recently, a Trump spokesperson referred them to a one-page letter that his former physician sent to Congress in July, a week after his assassination attempt.

The letter only describes a bullet wound to Trump’s ear and its healing progress, and the spokesperson did not respond to follow-up questions from the Times. It seems to fit a long-standing pattern from the former president, who also refused to release his medical records before the 2016 presidential election. At the time, he released a short letter from his personal doctor, Dr. Harold Bornstein, wildly claiming that Trump would be “the healthiest person ever elected to the presidency.”

Three years later, Bornstein would come out and say that Trump not only personally dictated the letter but also claimed that Trump’s ex-bodyguard raided his office and removed Trump’s medical records. This was followed by years of secrecy from Trump about his health.

In 2020, when Trump was diagnosed with Covid and was hospitalized, his doctors didn’t provide the public with many details about his condition, which was more serious than what was being disclosed. And even after the attempt on his life this July, Trump’s campaign didn’t hold a briefing on his health, make his doctors available to the press, or release his hospital records.

Since President Biden withdrew from the 2024 presidential election, Trump is now the oldest candidate in the race, at 78, and if reelected, would be 82 years old by the time his term ends, the oldest president in U.S. history. Biden’s decision to leave the race was in part due to questions about his age and cognitive health, and there’s no shortage of concern regarding Trump’s mental state.

The few details that came out about Trump’s health were during his presidency, showing high cholesterol and obesity. He also bragged about acing a dementia test, though he got all the details of the test wrong in his recollection. Maybe that’s just the tip of the iceberg, and Trump has some worse details that he doesn’t want the public to know.

The less Trump discloses to the public, though, the more speculation takes place. If the former president doesn’t have anything to hide and his health is as excellent as he claims, he should embrace transparency and release detailed records, especially since he’s vying for the most powerful job in the world.

Residents of Charleroi, Pennsylvania, eviscerated a fascist right-wing YouTuber attempting to report on Donald Trump’s claims that the town had been overrun by Haitian immigrants. 

“You’re embarrassing your mother!” shouted one man during an on-the-street interview with Tyler Oliveria, a conservative influencer from California who travels the country producing right-wing propaganda for his 1.8 million subscribers.

Last month, Trump had named-dropped Charleroi during a campaign event, launching right-wing speculation that an influx of Haitian immigrants had caused the town to become “virtually bankrupt.” Despite testimony from local officials stating that many of the president’s claims about the town were blatantly untrue, Oliveria traveled to Pennsylvania to speak with residents about the president’s outlandish accusations. 

Suffice to say, his blatant trolling was met with some hostility. 

“You’re silly, look at you, drinkin’ Monsters. You got a girlfriend?” the man asked, eliciting the devastating response from Oliveria, “I like Monster!”

“Bet you don’t got a girlfriend! Call her right now!” the resident shouted as Oliveria laughed, clearly unable to respond. “Bet! Bet! BET! BET YOU DON’T GOT A GIRLFRIEND, BOY! Bet. On camera, you’re a clown!”

“Alright,” Oliveria said, shrugging, as the man walked away. As Oliveria sang circus music to himself, he became distracted as a woman walking down the street behind him began to shout.

“Oh, I need to go back to where I came from? Where?” Oliveria yelled back. “What did I do to you, what did I do to you? What’s the problem?”

“You don’t need to be in Charleroi about these poor Haitian people,” she continued. “Making money, and they work FUCKING hard.”

“There you go, that’s all we came here to understand. Why did you come in here assuming we came here to serve trouble?” Oliveria asked.

“This is my motherfucking town, bitch,” the woman shouted, walking away. “I run this fucking town!” 

Oliveria smiled uncomfortably. “She runs the town, alright. Well, good to know we met the mayor,” he said, turning back to the first resident. 

“Bro, you just need to understand, you’re going to mature,” said the first resident. “Just understand, understand the fact that what you’re doing, you should expect this to happen.”

“I can’t come here and have a conversation with you?” Oliveria asked.

“But keep your composure,” the resident warned.  

Oliveria previously made a video about traveling to Springfield, Ohio, where he interviewed locals about the debunked rumors pushed by the Republican ticket that Haitian immigrants were eating their neighbors’ pets. Oliveria’s video about Springfield was textbook right-wing propaganda, according to The Verge. 

The video included interviews with some wildly racist locals interspersed with misleading A.I.-generated images, footage of a woman who was arrested for allegedly eating a cat in Canton, Ohio, and footage of gang members in Haiti.

Republican vice presidential pick JD Vance might have successfully skirted explaining whether Donald Trump lost the 2020 election during Tuesday night’s debate, but his answer eventually came to light.

While being chased down by comedian Jason Selvig, the MAGA politico admitted that he did believe the former president won the 2020 election. Still, Vance managed to avoid the immediate concern of the question: whether he would support a similar attempt to overturn the November election results if the Republican presidential nominee loses.

“If your opponent gets more votes, will you concede?” Selvig asked, to silence as Vance walked away, in a video posted Thursday.

Vance deflected the direct line of questioning Tuesday while on stage opposite Minnesota Governor Tim Walz. He brought up just about every hot-button topic under the sun—from inflation to Facebook’s content moderation policies—to avoid admitting whether he believed Trump won, and whether he would place his oath of office above his loyalty to the top of his ticket.

Vance still refused to yield, even during a heated back and forth with Walz, who noted that former Vice President Mike Pence’s decision to certify the election results was the reason why Vance was on the stage instead of the Indiana politician.

“Where is the firewall, if he knows he can do anything including taking an election, and his vice president’s not going to stand to it?” Walz asked on Tuesday. “That’s what we’re asking you, America. Will you keep your oath of office, even if the president doesn’t?

“So, America, I think you’ve got a really clear choice on who is gonna honor that democracy and who is gonna honor Donald Trump,” Walz said.

An unlikely state is spelling trouble for Republicans up and down the ballot this election cycle.

Polling by the Independent Center conducted this week shows independent Senate candidate Dan Osborn with a five-point lead over Republican incumbent Deb Fischer, with Osborn receiving 47 percent of the vote to Fischer’s 42 percent. Ten percent of voters say they are unsure. Other polls show Fischer with a slight lead, but independent and undecided voters will be a key group for this Senate race. As of this week, Nebraska is the second-closest Senate race in the country, according to 538.

With a thin 51–49 Democratic majority in the Senate today, Osborn could be the key for making sure Republicans don’t take control of the chamber. There is no Democratic candidate running in the Nebraska Senate race, but Osborn’s policies make it likely he’ll caucus with the party.

Osborn has made headlines for his working-class messaging, union leadership, and independent candidacy. “I hadn’t been a very political person until corporate greed came knocking on my door a few years ago, when I was president of my local union, and we went out on strike, at a time where the company was making record profits,” he told Semafor in September. As the president of his local union at the Kellogg’s plant, in 2021 he led 500 workers on strike for nearly three months to end a two-tiered benefits system and stop plant closings.

Nebraska, and the most populous city of Omaha, will be integral to securing victory for Democrats in the Senate, Congress, and White House. Nebraska is one of only two states that splits its electoral votes by congressional district (the other being Maine). One of Nebraska’s five electoral votes belongs to the blue dot of Omaha. Biden won Nebraska’s 2nd district in 2020, while Trump clinched the vote in 2016. (The Democratic House candidate for the district is also leading in the polls.)

The same poll that showed Osborn winning also showed Trump leading Kamala Harris by 11 points in the state, but Harris leads Trump in the Omaha-based district by nine points. Republicans, including Trump, are well aware of the importance of this one electoral vote. That’s why MAGA sought to change the state to a winner-take-all system this election cycle. That effort was thwarted by Nebraska Republicans in September.

Republicans may be in for a surprise in Texas this November, according to voter registration data that shows the Lone Star State has seen a surge of new voters since 2018.

Nearly 2.6 million people have registered to vote in the state since then-Representative Beto O’Rourke narrowly lost the midterm election to Senator Ted Cruz, adding roughly the size of Connecticut’s entire voter roll to the books. The bulk of those new voters originate from some of Texas’s most liberal territories, including the areas surrounding Dallas-Fort Worth, Houston, and Austin, reported the San Antonio Express-News.

And while that may not translate to an obvious win in a state with more than 30 million people, it has certainly caught the attention of local Republicans, who have diverted considerable attention toward maintaining their stronghold in the historically red state.

“We are in a competitive state and we are not going to win just sitting on our laurels,” Texas Republican strategist Dave Carney told the Express-News.

Rodney Ellis, a county commissioner in liberal Harris County, summed it up a little differently: “They’re terrified,” Ellis told the Express-News.

Cruz, meanwhile, has turned to begging for help in his own reelection campaign against  Democratic challenger Representative Colin Allred. In an interview with Newsmax on Tuesday, Cruz emphasized Democratic spending in his state, as well as his diminishing odds of taking the race.

“I want to encourage your viewers this morning: I need your help,” Cruz said, urging people to “contribute” to his campaign website.

“Chuck Schumer and George Soros are flooding cash into the state of Texas,” Cruz said. “There have been multiple polls in the last three weeks that show it as a four-point race, a three-point race, a two-point race, and there have been two polls that show it as a one-point race.”

But rather than appeal to the surge of new liberal voters in his state, Cruz has spent the last few months doubling down on far-right conspiracies. He helped to elevate a disturbing and baseless lie about Haitian immigrants eating pets in Springfield, Ohio, and has refused to say whether he would accept the outcome of the November election if it doesn’t go Donald Trump’s way. 

Cruz has also continued to idolize Trump, even after enduring possibly the ugliest verbal beating in Trump’s circle during the 2016 Republican presidential primary, which included Trump mocking the unpopular Texas senator for being so short he would need heels to reach the podium and plainly calling his wife ugly.

One gruesome detail in Jack Smith’s sweeping legal brief about Donald Trump’s involvement in January 6 has shocked legal experts.

The 165-page filing, which was unsealed Wednesday by Judge Tanya Chutkan, provides new details about the co-conspirators and specific allegations connected to the former president’s 2020 election-subversion scheme—including one about former Vice President Mike Pence.

As MAGA rioters swarmed the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, chanting their demand to “Hang Mike Pence!” a Trump aide received word that his running mate had been moved to a secure location for his safety, according to the filing.

The aide “rushed into the dining room to inform [Trump] in hopes that [Trump] would take action to ensure Pence’s safety.”

Instead, after the aide delivered the news, Trump allegedly replied, “So what?”

MSNBC legal analyst Lisa Rubin said Wednesday night, during an interview with MSNBC’s Nicole Wallace, that she was taken aback by multiple moments described in the filing, but Wallace plucked that one out as the most disturbing.

“I’ll read first what made Lisa Rubin gasp. Why make everybody wait?” said Wallace, before reading from page 142.

“The cavalierness with which Donald Trump received that news certainly is news to me,” Rubin said.

During an interview on CNN Wednesday, Harvard constitutional law professor Lawrence Tribe told host Erin Burnett he also found that quote to be one of the most outlandish.

“There are lots of jaw-dropping things; you’ve named some of them. You know: ‘So what’ if this vice president is hung? ‘It doesn’t matter’ whether we’ve won or lost. That’s just a sampling; it’s the tip of a horribly large and scary iceberg,” Tribe explained.

In the filing, Trump allegedly made a comment to his family members that “it doesn’t matter if you won or lost the election, you still have to fight like hell.”

Donald Trump is not taking the release of new evidence in his 2020 election fraud case well.

The 165-page motion from special counsel Jack Smith was released to the public on Wednesday, and it detailed not only the former president’s efforts to overturn the election but also his indifference to the violence of the January 6, 2021, Capitol insurrection. Trump took to Truth Social to complain almost immediately.

“The release of this falsehood-ridden, Unconstitutional, J6 brief immediately following Tim Walz’s disastrous Debate performance, and 33 days before the Most Important Election in the History of our Country, is another obvious attempt by the Harris-Biden regime to undermine and Weaponize American Democracy, and INTERFERE IN THE 2024 PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION,” Trump wrote in one long-winded post.

“Deranged Jack Smith, the hand picked Prosecutor of the Harris-Biden DOJ, and Washington, D.C. based Radical Left Democrats, are HELL BENT on continuing to Weaponize the Justice Department in an attempt to cling to power,” the former president added.

Trump made several other posts into Thursday morning complaining that Democrats were interfering in the election, “Weaponizing the Justice Department against me,” and calling the Justice Department “THE DEPARTMENT OF INJUSTICE.”

The former president is famously thin-skinned, but he also has reason to be worried. Smith’s legal filing includes wild details about Trump blatantly presenting lies and showing indifference to rioting in his name, as well as his plans to undermine the election results before they took place. It also is tailored to the Supreme Court’s immunity ruling, in an effort to ensure Trump faces accountability for his attempts to overturn the election. Trump’s outbursts online might be his attempt to distract the public from the damning proof against him.

MAGA allies are trying to move on from their cataclysmic reaction to losing the 2020 presidential election—but that doesn’t mean that their leader is trying to do the same.

In an interview Wednesday night with CNN’s Kaitlan Collins, House Majority Whip Tom Emmer brushed off concerns about the Republican reaction to the last election, claiming that no one but Collins was still focused on the election conspiracy.

“In 2020, you did sign onto that brief supporting a Texas lawsuit that would have invalidated the election results in four states,” Collins said. “But you ultimately chose to certify the election, you broke with some of your Republican colleagues, and you chose to certify.

“You said in a statement that ‘Congress does not have the authority to discard an individual slate of electors certified by a state’s legislature in accordance with their Constitution,’” Collins continued. “And you yourself said, ‘Doing so sets a precedent that I believe undermines the state-based system of elections that defines our Republic.’ Do you still feel that way tonight?”

“Again, Kaitlan, we’re talking about an election that’s going to take place in 35 days,” Emmer responded. “What are you doing talking about something that’s four years ago? We can have this debate at some other time going forward, but the people are hurting.”

But Collins had a point.

“Donald Trump is still talking about it,” the CNN anchor threw back.

Trump was posting about the election he lost as recently as Wednesday night, writing on Truth Social that he “didn’t rig the 2020 Election, they did!”

Some of Trump’s closest allies have refused to admit that the former president lost the 2020 election, dodging direct questions about whether they plan to reenact the same political violence after November’s election results roll in.

During Tuesday night’s vice presidential debate, Ohio Senator JD Vance refused to concede that the Republican presidential nominee lost the last election before doubling down during a heated exchange with Minnesota Governor Tim Walz.

“He is still saying he didn’t lose the election,” Walz said, turning to face Vance. “I would just ask that: Did he lose the 2020 election?”

“Tim, I’m focused on the future,” Vance responded, twisting his argument into a weird tie-in about Vice President Kamala Harris and Facebook’s content moderation policies during the Covid-19 pandemic.

“That is a very damning nonanswer,” Walz said.