ANALYSIS | The great political battle over Hurricane Milton did not wait for the storm to make landfall

() – Long before the outer bands of Hurricane Milton hit the Florida coast, a political battle was raging over the massive storm.

A potential natural catastrophe of such magnitude – it could be the gigantic climate-change-fueled monster that scientists have long feared – should be immune to political opportunism.

But in the final weeks of a presidential election led by a candidate as implacable as Donald Trump, nothing escapes partisanship and the aftermath of Milton may prove to be the next opening for the former president’s maelstrom of misinformation.

Normally, political upheavals caused by hurricanes are only triggered when the hurricane-force winds have passed. This time, in part because Trump pushed so hard to exploit last week’s Hurricane Helene for his political benefit, the showdown has begun early.

For Vice President Kamala Harris, the storm offers a dangerous spotlight, which could allow her to demonstrate that she dominates the media moment in a presidential context. It could show his ability to express empathy for victims and his mastery of the machinery of the federal government. But any failure in federal rescue and relief efforts after the storm’s arrival, scheduled for late Wednesday or early Thursday, could haunt her before next month’s elections. Harris’ test will be complicated by the likelihood that even if the federal effort goes well, Trump is sure to fabricate a story implicating her in failure.

This explains why the Democratic candidate tried to weather Trump — and the storm — by telling reporters Monday night that the former president was spreading misinformation about government aid. “It’s about him, not about you.” The vice president doubled down on Tuesday, telling ABC’s “The View” that “this is not an issue that has to do with partisanship or politics for certain leaders, but perhaps it does for others.”

Government officials reinforced the vice president’s message this Tuesday. FEMA Administrator Deanne Criswell warned on “ News Central” that Trump’s rhetoric was making people afraid that the government would not help them. And the White House opened an account on Reddit, a social media platform, to identify and combat misinformation.

President Joe Biden may be managing the last major national emergency of his term. The sense of urgency increased on Tuesday morning when he postponed a trip abroad to Germany and Angola. No president can afford to be abroad with a national emergency pending. Biden’s first task is to fulfill his primary presidential duty: keeping Americans safe. But with his foreign policy legacy likely to be tainted by unresolved wars in the Middle East, he surely wants to avoid a domestic imbroglio that would also overshadow his final days in office and could harm his chosen successor, Harris.

Trump has repeatedly demonstrated that there is no situation that he will not try to exploit for political gain. He took advantage of Hurricane Helene to reinforce his narrative that the Biden-Harris Government was incompetent, incapable of meeting the basic needs of the American people. It’s the same way he has accused Harris of complicity in a national crisis that he says is marked by crime and rampant immigration and is headed toward World War III. Trump’s criticism is a caricature. Although the country is in trouble – grocery prices remain stubbornly high and the asylum system is overwhelmed – it is manufacturing a classic alternative reality for its followers and the conservative media echo chamber.

Trump used the same tactic during the Hurricane Helene drama, falsely accusing Democrats of ignoring Republican areas. The former president wrongly said Biden ignored calls from Georgia’s Republican governor, Brian Kemp. He also falsely claimed that Harris had drained the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s budget to house undocumented immigrants and therefore could not help storm victims. And Trump, along with his running mate, Senator JD Vance, misled the country by claiming that the federal government was only offering $750 in aid to citizens who lost their homes. Some of Trump’s claims were denied by Republican leaders in Georgia and Tennessee. But from Trump’s point of view, it doesn’t matter if his claims are crazy. The point is to gain a foothold among voters who may not know the nuances of federal aid, but who could take away an unflattering image of Harris.

Trump maintains that both Harris and Biden are mentally deficient and unfit for the office of president. He has denied Democrats’ claims that he is politicizing hurricane season after heading to the North Carolina battlefield to make false claims about government incompetence. “Anything I do, they’ll say, oh, it’s political,” the former president told Laura Ingraham on Fox on Monday. “If I do something good, no matter what I do, they’ll say, oh, he did it for politics. I mean, they could have gotten there long before me.” Trump’s own haphazard leadership after the hurricanes could also backfire.

Harris’ campaign on Monday sought to revive memories of her checkered disaster management record, launching an advertisement with two former Trump administration officials, Olivia Troye and Kevin Carroll, claiming that the former president once tried to withhold disaster relief funds from Democratic states.

And Harris used the gathering storm as a prism to criticize Trump’s character and push her argument that he is an “unserious man” who poses a major threat if elected again. On ABC’s “The View” this Tuesday, she accused him of putting “the needs of others” before him. Harris added: “I’m afraid it really lacks empathy at a very basic level to care about other people’s suffering and then understand that the role of a leader is not to beat people down, it is to lift people up, especially in times of crisis.”

All in all, Trump’s maneuvers are the latest example of an advantage he has over Harris despite having his own presidential record to defend: not being in power, he can afford to criticize the government’s actions without assuming any responsibility. staff.

Storm politics is marked by the memory of two catastrophes. The disastrous handling of Hurricane Katrina, which struck New Orleans and the Gulf Coast in 2005, helped destroy President George W. Bush’s second term. And President Barack Obama’s safer handling of Superstorm Sandy, a hurricane that hit the East Coast in 2012, helped him defeat Republican Mitt Romney in that year’s election. Sandy is best remembered for then-New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie’s embrace of Obama as he sought maximum federal aid for his state. This angered many Republicans. And he marked Christie’s subsequent Republican presidential campaigns for his decision to put duty before politics.

One key political player who is unlikely to make the same decision is Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, who may have future national political ambitions following his failed run for the 2024 Republican nomination. DeSantis faces a dilemma similar to Christie’s. : the need to work seamlessly with a Democratic government for the good of his state despite his disdain for the president and vice president.

And his future political considerations probably couldn’t withstand a failed relief effort any more than Harris’s could. Like Harris, DeSantis began playing hurricane politics long before Milton arrived. A White House official told that he had rejected Harris’ calls about the hurricane; a statement that he denied but that did not spare him a reprimand from the vice president.

DeSantis embarked on a political path that requires dealing with Biden, a politician who is on his way out, but without doing anything that would boost Harris and earn Trump’s ire. “She is being selfish by trying to interfere when we are handling this perfectly,” DeSantis said Monday night. “I have weathered storms under both President Trump and Biden, and I have worked well with both. She is the first to try to politicize the storm, and she is doing it solely for her campaign. “He’s trying to take advantage somehow,” the Florida Republican complained.

Unlike Harris, Biden had kinder words for DeSantis, saying Tuesday that the governor had been “cooperative.”

“I told him no: ‘You’re doing a great job, everything is being done well, we appreciate it,’” Biden said.

But the president also took out a political insurance policy against any future complaints that the Florida Republican didn’t get what he wants from the White House. “I literally gave him my personal phone number to call,” Biden said.