The great political battle over Hurricane Milton didn’t wait for the storm to land

Analysis by Stephen Collinson, CNN

(CNN) — Long before the outer bands of Hurricane Milton lashed the Florida coast, a political battle over the massive storm was already raging.

A potential natural disaster of such magnitude — this may be the gargantuan climate-change fueled monster that scientists have long feared — ought to be immune from political opportunism.

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

Usually, political shocks caused by hurricanes only unfold when the gale force winds have passed. This time, partly because Trump pushed so hard to exploit last week’s Hurricane Helene for his political gain, the sparring has started early.

For Vice President Kamala Harris, the storm offers a perilous spotlight, which could allow her to show she can master the media moment in a presidential context. It could showcase her capacity to express empathy for victims and her command of the federal government machine. But any failures of the federal rescue and relief effort after the storm is expected to roar ashore on late Wednesday or early Thursday could haunt her before next month’s election. 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 nominee tried to get out in front of Trump, and the storm, by telling reporters on Monday evening that the former president was pushing out misinformation about government aid. “It’s about him, it’s not about you.” The vice president doubled down on Tuesday, telling ABC’s “The View” that “this is not an issue that is about partisanship or politics for certain leaders, but maybe is for others.”

Government officials reinforced the vice president’s message on Tuesday. FEMA Administrator Deanne Criswell warned on “CNN News Central” that Trump’s rhetoric was putting fear into people that the government wouldn’t 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 handling the last major national emergency of his term. A sense of urgency mounted Tuesday morning when he postponed a foreign trip to Germany and Angola. No president can afford to be abroad with a national emergency pending. Biden’s first task is to fulfill his core presidential duty — keeping Americans safe. But with his foreign policy legacy likely to be besmirched 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 damage his chosen successor, Harris.

A storm of this size could give Trump a political opening

Trump has repeatedly shown there’s no situation he will not try to leverage for political gain. He seized on Hurricane Helene to bolster his narrative of the Biden-Harris administration as an incompetent rabble, unable to meet the basic needs of the American people. It’s the same way he’s accused Harris of complicity in a national crisis that he claims is marked by crime and rampant immigration and is on a glide path to World War III. Trump’s critique is a caricature. While the country has problems – grocery prices remain stubbornly high and the asylum system is overwhelmed – he’s creating a classic alternative reality for his fans and the conservative media echo chamber.

Trump used the same tactics during the Hurricane Helene drama, falsely accusing Democrats of ignoring Republican areas. The ex-president wrongly said that Biden was ignoring calls from Georgia GOP Gov. Brian Kemp. He also claimed, falsely, that Harris had busted the Federal Emergency Management Agency budget to house undocumented migrants and could therefore not help victims of the storm. And Trump and his running mate, Sen. 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 debunked by Republican leaders in Georgia and Tennessee. But from Trump’s point of view, it doesn’t matter whether his claims are nonsense. It’s all about making inroads with voters who may not know nuances of the federal relief effort but might take away an unflattering portrayal of Harris.

Trump argues that both Harris and Biden are mentality deficient and not up to the job of president. He’s denied Democratic claims that he’s politicizing hurricane season after rushing to battleground North Carolina to make false claims about the administration’s incompetence. “Anything I do, they’ll say, oh, it’s political,” the ex-president told Laura Ingraham on Fox on Monday. “If I do anything good, no matter what I do, they’ll say, oh, he did it for politics. I mean, they could have gotten there way before me.” Trump’s own haphazard leadership after hurricanes could also come back to haunt him.

The Harris campaign on Monday sought to revive memories of his checkered disaster management record, debuting an ad featuring 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 seized on the approaching storm as a prism to criticize Trump’s character and to push her argument that he’s an “unserious man” who poses a great threat if he’s elected again. On ABC’s “The View” on Tuesday, she accused him of putting himself “before the needs of others.” Harris added: “I fear that he really lacks empathy on a very basic level to care about the suffering of other people and then understand the role of a leader is not to beat people down, it’s to lift people up especially in a time of crisis.”

Still, Trump’s maneuvering is the latest sign of one advantage he holds over Harris despite having a presidential record of his own to defend — as a non-incumbent, he has the luxury of criticizing the administration’s performance while bearing no personal responsibility.

The legacies that shape storm politics

Storm politics are shaped by memories of two disasters. The botched handling of Hurricane Katrina, which slammed New Orleans and the Gulf coast in 2005, helped destroy President George W. Bush’s second term. And President Barack Obama’s more assured management of Superstorm Sandy, a hurricane that hit the East Coast in 2012, helped him put away Republican Mitt Romney in that year’s election. Sandy is mostly 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 Christie was followed during his subsequent GOP presidential campaigns by his decision to put his duty before politics.

One key political player who is unlikely to make the same choice is Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, who may have future national political ambitions following his failed run for the 2024 Republican nomination. DeSantis faces a similar dilemma to Christie — a need to work seamlessly with a Democratic administration for the good of his state despite his disdain for the president and vice president. And his future political considerations could probably not bear a failed relief effort any more than Harris’ could. Like Harris, DeSantis started playing hurricane politics long before Milton arrived. A White House official told CNN that he had refused her calls about the hurricane — a claim that he denied but that didn’t spare him a rebuke from the vice president.  

DeSantis set off on a political path that requires dealing with Biden, the lame duck, but doing nothing to boost Harris in a way that could earn the wrath of Trump. “She is being selfish by trying to blunder into this when we’re working just fine,” DeSantis said on Monday evening. “I’ve had storms under both President Trump and President Biden, and I’ve worked well with both of them. She’s the first one who’s trying to politicize the storm, and she’s doing that just because of her campaign. She’s trying to get some type of an edge,” the Florida Republican complained.

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

“I said no, ‘You’re doing a great job, it’s all being done well, we thank you for it,’” Biden said.

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

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