President Donald Trump on Friday met with local officials in western North Carolina towns still recovering from Hurricane Helene, accusing the Biden administration of not doing enough to get aid where it’s needed, vowing to speed up recovery efforts and threatening to shut down the Federal Emergency Management Agency altogether.
“It doesn’t matter at this point. [former President Joe] Biden did a bad job,” Trump said during a roundtable with local officials in Fletcher, where he said some residents still don’t have drinking water and didn’t get sufficient financial compensation following the storm. “This is totally unacceptable, and I’ll be taking strong action.”
In December, Congress approved an additional $29 billion for FEMA to cover ongoing relief efforts. Asked exactly how much additional disaster relief he might approve for North Carolina, the president didn’t specify, stating only that he planned to do “a lot” for the state.
Although local leaders around the table validated Trump’s assertion that the recovery efforts were a failure on Biden’s part, the president based his case in part on unproven internet rumors, suggesting that federal aid skipped over people with Trump signs in their yards.
The trip to western North Carolina was Trump’s first outside of Washington since his inauguration on Monday and the first leg of a multiday swing that will also take him to California, where he will assess fire damage in and around Los Angeles, and Nevada.
By spotlighting the plight of North Carolinians still struggling to get their lives back on track before traveling to California, Trump is attempting to strengthen a political argument about federal aid. As some Republicans have floated the possibility of conditioning disaster relief for California following the fires, for which they have blamed Democratic state and local officials, Trump argued that his primary concern is making sure federal aid is distributed fairly across red and blue states.
The president also repeated his plans to overhaul FEMA, which he told reporters on the flight down “has really let us down and the country.”
“We’re looking at the whole concept of FEMA,” Trump said during the briefing with local officials. “I’d like to see the states take over.” He did not say how soon he might look to shutter the agency.
Immediately after the storm pummeled the state in September, North Carolina was also hit with a storm of misinformation about disaster aid, including false reports about federal money being diverted to undocumented immigrants. It continued this week following Trump’s inauguration with another bogus postthanking the new president for diverting $2 million in funding for programs aiding undocumented immigrants to North Carolina hurricane relief.