Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump traveled to hurricane-blasted Georgia to deliver remarks and help hand out supplies, one day after he leveraged the devastating storm as a political attack against Democratic nominee Kamala Harris.
Trump insisted his motive for Monday’s visit to to the southern city of Valdosta was apolitical.
“We’re not talking about politics now,” Trump said in remarks to the press outside the heavily damaged brick facade of a building that had housed dozens of furniture vendors.
But his presence in the key electoral battleground dovetailed with his recent remarks bashing Harris for not immediately traveling to the hurricane-affected zone.
Trump also appeared to slight President Joe Biden by falsely claiming that Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp, a Republican, had been “calling the president [but] hasn’t been able to get him.”
But Kemp said that Biden had called him on Sunday.
“The president just called me yesterday afternoon,” the governor said earlier Monday. “I missed him and I called him right back. And he just said, ‘Hey, what do you need?'”
Trump in Valdosta also said he had recently spoken with billionaire Elon Musk, the Tesla and SpaceX CEO, about using Starlink, SpaceX’s satellite internet service, to help restore communication in the region.
The Homeland Security Department said Monday that it had already provided 40 Starlink satellite systems to aid communications and recovery in North Carolina.
Trump’s event was coordinated with Samaritan’s Purse, a Christian humanitarian aid group founded by Franklin Graham, the son of influential evangelical leader Billy Graham.
The short-notice trip to Georgia came as Harris scrapped planned campaign stops in Las Vegas in order to return to Washington, D.C., for a briefing with the Federal Emergency Management Agency.
Biden, meanwhile, said earlier Monday that he and Harris hope to travel to hurricane-damaged areas once they can be sure their presence will not disrupt emergency response efforts. He later said that he expects to make a trip on Wednesday or Thursday.
The hurricane’s death toll has mounted to 116 since it made landfall as a Category 4 storm in northern Florida on Thursday night, according to NBC News’ count.
At least 25 people in Georgia have been killed, Kemp said Monday morning. Deaths have also been reported in Florida, South Carolina, North Carolina, Tennessee and Virginia.
Ferocious rains, wind and floods have left millions of people without electricity, and entire towns — including those hundreds of miles inland, like Asheville, North Carolina — have been submerged under feet of water.
On Sunday, Trump attacked Biden and Harris in politically charged terms over their response to Helene.
“They raise a lot of money from bad people, fundraising events with their radical left lunatic donors, when big parts of our country have been devastated by that massive hurricane, and is underwater with many, many people dead,” Trump said at a campaign rally in Erie, Pennsylvania.
“She ought to be here. She ought to be down in the area where she should be. That’s what she’s getting paid for, right? That’s what she’s getting paid for.”
The Harris campaign and its allies had already lashed out at Trump for his remarks about Helene at a rally in Michigan on Friday, when he told those affected by the hurricane, “We’re with you all the way, and if we were there, we’d be helping you, and you’ll be OK.”
A Harris campaign social media account quickly shared that clip to suggest Trump was downplaying the disaster. The clip racked by Monday morning had racked up more than 5 million views on X, according to the site’s tally.
Trump’s allies said the clip was taken out of context and defended his remarks, saying he was offering comfort to the storm’s victims.
But some of the former president’s opponents drew parallels between the quote and Trump’s insensitive responses to previous natural disasters, including his tossing paper towel rolls into a crowd of people who survived a hurricane in Puerto Rico in 2017.
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