Disaster relief during the Trump administration

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Manetho
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Disaster relief during the Trump administration

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As Ceeboo has declared his intention to vote for Trump on the reasoning that he would govern along the same lines he did during his first term, let's take a moment to consider what that term was actually like.
Politico wrote:In the aftermath of Hurricane Helene, former President Donald Trump has blasted the Biden administration for its handling of the disaster — going so far as to accuse Democratic leaders of ignoring the needs of Republican storm victims.

But a review of Trump’s record by POLITICO’s E&E News and interviews with two former Trump White House officials show that the former president was flagrantly partisan at times in response to disasters and on at least three occasions hesitated to give disaster aid to areas he considered politically hostile or ordered special treatment for pro-Trump states.

Mark Harvey, who was Trump’s senior director for resilience policy on the National Security Council staff, told E&E News on Wednesday that Trump initially refused to approve disaster aid for California after deadly wildfires in 2018 because of the state’s Democratic leanings.

But 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, Harvey said.

The exchange has not been previously reported.

“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.

Both Harvey and Olivia Troye, a former Trump White House homeland security adviser who backed up Harvey’s claim, say Trump is approaching Hurricane Helene with a similar mindset. They say he is politicizing a disaster that has killed more than 170 people in six states. And Troye, who has endorsed Harris for president, accused Trump of trying to divert attention from his own political liabilities on disaster responses.

She said if Trump wins the White House again, he will view disasters through a political lens that values personal loyalty over damage considerations.

“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 in an interview Wednesday.

Troye, who played a lead role in federal disaster response, said local political leaders regularly called her office begging for help because Trump refused to sign documents approving aid. Troye said she had to repeatedly enlist former Vice President Mike Pence to apply pressure.

Added Harvey: “There’s no empathy for the survivors. It is all about getting your photo-op, right? Disaster theater to make him look good.”
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Some Schmo
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Re: Disaster relief during the Trump administration

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We can always rely on Trump to bounce rolls of paper towel off people's heads if they've been through a disaster. That will get their houses back up and running.

It's extremely hard to be forgiving of a Trump vote. It shows such a lack of knowledge and basic intelligence. It's an indictment on the American education system (not necessarily the teachers, although I'm sure there are duds, but on the system itself and the American sentiment toward education). I know most Americans are good people, but they expose something unfavorable about themselves voting for Trump.
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Manetho
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Re: Disaster relief during the Trump administration

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Back in the present day, the Republican-controlled House of Representatives won't reconvene to provide disaster relief, even for Republican voters.
NBC News wrote:House Speaker Mike Johnson on Sunday did not commit to calling Congress back into session before the election after President Joe Biden pressed congressional leaders about potential funding shortfalls in the aftermath of Hurricane Helene.

In an interview on “Fox News Sunday,” Johnson was asked about Biden’s letter to congressional leaders on Friday requesting more money for federal disaster recovery efforts and after Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas warned that the department doesn’t have enough money to get through the rest of hurricane season.

In his letter, the president urged Congress to restore funding to the Small Business Administration’s disaster loan program, which was facing potential funding shortfalls even before Hurricane Helene devastated parts of the Southeast. The president noted that the White House requested more funding for the program as Congress prepared a short-term funding bill that passed last month to avert a government shutdown.
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Manetho
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Re: Disaster relief during the Trump administration

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Trump also withheld wildfire relief from Washington state because he had a personal grudge against the governor.
Politico wrote:In early September 2020, wildfires tore through eastern Washington state, obliterating tens of millions of dollars of property, displacing hundreds of rural residents and killing a 1-year-old boy.

But then-President Donald Trump refused to act on Gov. Jay Inslee’s request for $37 million in federal disaster aid because of a bitter personal dispute with the Democratic governor, an investigation by POLITICO’s E&E News shows.

Trump sat on Inslee’s request for the final four months of his presidency, delaying recovery and leaving communities unsure about rebuilding because nobody knew if they would get federal help.

Trump ignored Inslee’s 73-page request even after the Federal Emergency Management Agency found during weeks of inspection that the wildfires easily met the federal damage threshold for disaster aid…

Trump’s spurning of Washington — documented by internal emails, letters, federal records and interviews — is the latest example of how the former president used disaster requests to punish political foes. E&E News reported in early October that Trump had refused to give disaster aid to California after wildfires in 2018 because the state is strongly Democratic.

E&E News’ current investigation found other previously unreported examples of Trump denying or delaying disaster aid to governors who had criticized him, though the reasons for the White House moves are unclear.

Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers, a Republican representing the wildfire-damaged area in Washington state, asked Trump at least twice to approve disaster aid and wrote him a desperate letter on Dec. 31, 2020, obtained by E&E News.

“People in my district need support, and I implore you to move forward in providing it to those who have been impacted by devastating wildfires,” McMorris Rodgers wrote. Her district was one of three in Washington state to support Trump in the 2020 election.
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Manetho
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Re: Disaster relief during the Trump administration

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And, of course, thousands more Americans died of COVID than needed to, because of Trump's refusal to take the problem seriously. As described in Vanity Fair in September 2020, there was no federal effort to produce more of the medical supplies needed to limit the spread of the virus, so states were left to compete with each other for the supplies that already existed.
Katherine Eban wrote:On the evening of Saturday, March 21, a small group of Silicon Valley entrepreneurs, business executives, and venture capitalists gathered in the White House Situation Room to offer their help to the Trump administration as it confronted a harrowing shortage of lifesaving supplies to battle COVID-19.

More than seven weeks after the federal government first learned that a new and lethal coronavirus was barreling toward U.S. shores, hospitals were pleading for masks, gloves, and other personal protective equipment to safeguard their medical staff. Intensive care nurses had been photographed wearing garbage bags instead of gowns. More than 19,600 Americans had been diagnosed with the disease, and at least 260 had died.

The meeting’s attendees—some present, some dialing in—were a bipartisan collection of heavy hitters. The ad hoc group had spent weeks canvassing America’s private sector to map the shortages and draft a plan to solve them. Briefly using a hotel ballroom in Washington, D.C., as a makeshift headquarters, they sought answers to some urgent questions: What capacity did America’s companies have to manufacture protective equipment and medical supplies? What supplies could be ordered now? Were there hidden reserves?...

Those representing the private sector expected to learn about a sweeping government plan to procure supplies and direct them to the places they were needed most. New York, home to more than a third of the nation’s coronavirus cases, seemed like an obvious candidate. In turn they came armed with specific commitments of support, a memo on the merits of the Defense Production Act, a document outlining impediments to the private-sector response, and two key questions: How could they best help? And how could they best support the government’s strategy?

What actually transpired in the room stunned a number of those in attendance. Vanity Fair has reconstructed the details of the meeting for the first time, based on recollections, notes, and calendar entries from three people who attended the meeting. All quotations are based on the recollections of one or more individual attendees.

Kushner, seated at the head of the conference table, in a chair taller than all the others, was quick to strike a confrontational tone. “The federal government is not going to lead this response,” he announced. “It’s up to the states to figure out what they want to do.”

One attendee explained to Kushner that due to the finite supply of PPE, Americans were bidding against each other and driving prices up. To solve that, businesses eager to help were looking to the federal government for leadership and direction.

“Free markets will solve this,” Kushner said dismissively. “That is not the role of government.”

The same attendee explained that although he believed in open markets, he feared that the system was breaking. As evidence, he pointed to a CNN report about New York governor Andrew Cuomo and his desperate call for supplies.

“That’s the CNN BS,” Kushner snapped. “They lie.”

According to another attendee, Kushner then began to rail against the governor: “Cuomo didn’t pound the phones hard enough to get PPE for his state… His people are going to suffer and that’s their problem.”

“That’s when I was like, 'We’re screwed',” the shocked attendee told Vanity Fair.

The group argued for invoking the Defense Production Act. “We were all saying, ‘Mr. Kushner, if you want to fix this problem for PPE and ventilators, there’s a path to do it, but you have to make a policy change,’” one person who attended the meeting recounted.

In response Kushner got “very aggressive,” the attendee recalled. “He kept invoking the markets” and told the group they “only understood how entrepreneurship works, but didn’t understand how government worked.”

Though Kushner’s arguments “made no sense,” said the attendee, there seemed to be little hope of changing his mind. “It felt like Kushner was the president. He sat in the chair and he was clearly making the decisions.”
"His people are going to suffer and that’s their problem."
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Re: Disaster relief during the Trump administration

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As Politico pointed out, the average time between a states request for a disaster declaration and its granting by an administration is 17 days. Trump Day on Washington’s request after a devastating fire in 2020 for four months because he is too thin skinned to take criticism. Even worse was what he did to Georgia after Hurricane Zeta in 2020. Georgia requested its disaster declaration before Alabama’s. Alabama’s was approved in less than two weeks. But Trump needed a few thousand votes in Georgia, so he held up the disaster relief for Georgia until after Congress counted the votes and certified Biden as the winner.

In both cases, FEMA officials said that the requests qualified for relief. That is why Trump and the Heritage Foundation want to purge the government of non partisan civil servants who do things like evaluate disaster requests in a non partisan manner with party apparatchiks just like Lenin, Stalin, Putin, and Mao.

Not only have Project 2024 and Agenda 47 been lining up an army of Steven Miller and Don Trump Jr.’s, there been flooding the federal government with massive FOIA requests, at times at the rate of one per second, trying to scour every single e-mail and scrap of paper looking to find any sign of disagreement with Trump, R Congressional leaders, and the National Review and other right wing think tanks. Not use of governmental power in a partisan way (which is fine with Trump as long as it is used in his favor) but for any sign the the employee would not use his power in whatever way Trump tells them to.

No more will pesky FEMA employees evaluate disaster relief requests based on merit. The evaluation will be based on who Trump wants to reward and who he wants to punish.
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Re: Disaster relief during the Trump administration

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Manetho wrote:
Fri Oct 04, 2024 12:54 am
As Ceeboo has declared
In a thread titled "Disaster relief during the Trump administration", the author begins his OP with "As Ceeboo has declared."

Lol.

I am confident that another very interesting and engaging 'topical discussion' will soon be added to all of the other great topics/discussions taking place.
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Manetho
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Re: Disaster relief during the Trump administration

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ceeboo wrote:
Mon Oct 28, 2024 9:55 pm
I am confident that another very interesting and engaging 'topical discussion' will soon be added to all of the other great topics/discussions taking place.
The opening sentence was the only place your name came up. The rest of it is about disaster relief during the Trump administration. Read the thread and see for yourself.
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Re: Disaster relief during the Trump administration

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ceeboo wrote:
Mon Oct 28, 2024 9:55 pm
I am confident that another very interesting and engaging 'topical discussion' will soon be added to all of the other great topics/discussions taking place.
There are several great discussions taking place here. You are rarely a part of them, so I can see how you'd be unaware.
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Manetho
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Re: Disaster relief during the Trump administration

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One of the most damning signs of Trump's attitude toward his duties is this anecdote from Bob Woodward:
 
One of the most remarkable interviews I had with him that year was July 20th, 2020, turned out to be the last interview. And all year I'm learning from the doctors how bad the coronavirus is, the numbers in the country are piling up, and on July 20th I said, "Mr. President, 140,000 people have died from this virus already." All he had to do was warn the public, and he keeps saying "No, no, it's going to go away, it's going to be fine," when I had asked before. But I ask again, "What's the plan? What are you going to do?" and he — this is one of those interviews with the sitting president where your head kind of spins — and he said, "Oh, don't worry, I'll have a plan in 106 days." What? A hundred and six days? I realize that's Election Day. He's worried about the election in 106 days.
Trump doesn't know how to govern. He didn't even care what governance is for. He only thought about COVID in relation to his chances of reelection. He treated relief for other disasters as a way to get back at people he didn't like. His presidency was a means for him to aggrandize himself. Nothing else mattered.
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