Trump Hesitated To Grant Disaster Aid To Blue States, Report Says

As president, Donald Trump wavered on decisions to grant federal disaster aid to states where he believed fewer people supported him, according to a new report from Politico that cites interviews with two former Trump administration officials.

One of the officials was Mark Harvey, who served on the National Security Council as senior director of resilience policy. He told the outlet that Trump initially did not want to send the Federal Emergency Management Agency to Southern California amid the devastating wildfires there in 2018.

“We went as far as looking up how many votes he got in those impacted areas … to show him these are people who voted for you,” Harvey told Politico.

“There’s no empathy for the survivors. It is all about getting your photo-op, right? Disaster theater to make him look good,” he added.

He went on: “It was very much a business deal, like, ‘This a lot of money. What are we getting in return for it?’”

Olivia Troye, another former National Security Council official under Trump, shared the same sentiments with the outlet, saying that she had to repeatedly ask Vice President Mike Pence to intervene when Trump ignored local officials’ pleas for help.

Both Troye and Harvey have endorsed Trump’s opponent, Vice President Kamala Harris, in the 2024 election.

Politico also pointed to the Trump administration’s bungling of FEMA aid to Puerto Rico after Hurricane Maria in 2017.

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) wrote about another instance in which Trump viewed disaster relief through a political lens in his memoir “The Courage To Be Free,” the outlet noted. When DeSantis came to Trump to ask for more help for the hurricane-devastated panhandle region, Trump responded, “They love me in the panhandle. … Huge crowds. What do they need?”

The report comes as Trump has been falsely claiming that President Joe Biden’s administration is not aiding people in Republican-leaning areas hit by Hurricane Helene.

Since Helene hit large swaths of the southeastern United States last week, Trump has claimed Biden is “sleeping” and not taking calls from Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp (R).

But Kemp told reporters that Biden has been helpful and that the state is getting what it needs from the federal government.

As president, Trump took funding from FEMA in order to finance his efforts to keep migrants in Mexico while they attempt to declare asylum in the U.S.

And Project 2025, the right-wing blueprint for a second Trump administration, calls for deep cuts to FEMA and drastically downsizing the National Weather Service, which provides vital storm tracking services.