After the hurricane Helenea few days ago, the imminent arrival of the tropical storm Miltonsupposed to be the most violent to hit the Tampa region in Florida in a century, Wednesday evening, does not only put American civil security on alert. It also seems to contribute to the formation of another cyclone, in the political sphere, where the two camps currently in the electoral campaign are attacking each other, with this natural disaster in the background, thus complicating both the prevention and the future management of the ongoing climate drama.
On Monday, Vice President Kamala Harris accused Florida Governor Ron DeSantis of “playing a political game” after he allegedly refused to take calls from the Democratic candidate who wanted to talk about resources and reconstruction with the local elected official after the passage of the hurricane Heleneon September 24. The Republican would have described the approach as “partisan” to justify his silence, according to a member of his entourage cited by the NBC network.
“People desperately need support right now, and playing political games, at the height of an emergency, is completely irresponsible and selfish,” Ms.me Harris in a clip aired Monday on Fox News. On the same network, DeSantis responded by calling the Democrat’s comments “delusional” and in turn accusing her of seeking to “politicize the storm” simply because she is on an “election campaign,” a- he added.
She wouldn’t be the only one to try to do so, either. At the beginning of the week, Donald Trump took to his capital letters and his social network to attack his political opponent without much nuance: “The response to the hurricane [Helene] by Kamala Harris the liar is now ranked the worst fightback in history, he wrote. North Carolina, Georgia, Florida, South Carolina, Tennessee, Alabama and the others will remember this by voting for Trump,” he proclaimed.
After the downpours and violent winds that hit several southern states at the end of September, and with the approach of Milton, which could become a category 3 hurricane when it arrives on the west coast of Florida, it is a storm of tackles, rumors and disinformation which is now hitting the American political terrain.
On Monday, the same Donald Trump accused the government of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris of having diverted “almost all the money intended for the Federal Emergency Management Agency”, FEMA, to support “immigration illegal,” he wrote to his millions of subscribers, calling on them to vote for him in November.
On Friday, his new friend, billionaire Elon Musk, attacked the Agency, accusing it of preventing ordinary citizens, like him and members of his company SpaceX, from offering help to victims left behind. in the wake of the hurricane. Elsewhere online, conspiracies proliferate about storm-stricken land confiscated by the Agency, racial discrimination in aid distribution, and the village of Chimney Rock, North Carolina, abandoned by security civil to allow Joe Biden to extract lithium there.
“Everything that is shown and said on this subject is false,” summarized the mayor of the said village, Peter O’Leary, quoted this week by NPR. “It’s a bit disturbing and upsetting to see people believing horrible things rather than the truth. »
The climate of distrust, doubt and lies purposely nourished by the American right has also forced the Federal Agency to no longer only manage the emergency and the distribution of aid on the ground, but also to manage a page on its website to set the record straight on several of these airborne alternative realities. And this, even if the damage already seems to be done.
“This government is giving money to Ukraine right now, but it is not helping the citizens here in the United States during the hurricane,” summarized in the pages of the Washington Postthe young Ashley Flores, 30, met at an event organized by a group of Latin Americans supporting Donald Trump in Las Vegas, Nevada. We see it in real time. They don’t want to give anything. They don’t care about American citizens. »
Kamala Harris vilified her Republican opponent for spreading rumors and misinformation about disaster relief in public, calling the gesture “extremely irresponsible.” “ “It’s once again about him and not about you,” she told reporters before flying to New York, recalling that “FEMA has a lot of resources at the disposal of those who are in desperate need.”
Action, reaction. The Democrat’s campaign team decided to launch an online campaign in the last few days highlighting the irony of Donald Trump’s attacks against the Biden-Harris government by highlighting the way in which he, as president, in the face of similar natural disasters. “He would suggest not giving aid to states that didn’t vote for him,” Kevin Carroll, a former senior adviser at the Department of Homeland Security, says in the ad.
A Politico investigation noted that in 2017, his government was quicker to help victims of hurricanes in Texas than in Puerto Rico. The following year, Trump hesitated to support disaster victims in California, after major forest fires, before realizing that several affected regions had a high concentration of Republican voters.
Faced with the flooding that hit Michigan in 2020, Donald Trump also threatened to block aid funding, due to the local government’s decision to make it easier to access mail-in voting, reported at the time the CBS network.