No Need To Wonder: We Have Four Years Of Proof As To How Disaster Aid Will Be Targeted In The Future
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Late in the 2024 campaign, a former top official on Trump’s National Security Council, Mike Harvey, told Politico’s E & E News that Trump initially refused to provide aid for 2018 California wildfires until aides told him how many of his supporters lived in the affected area. A month before that report, Trump publicly threatened that his incoming administration “won’t give [Newsom] money to put out all his fires” if Newsom didn’t divert more water for farmers. Trump as president in 2019 also publicly threatened to cut off California wildfire aid, saying: “Every year, as the fire’s rage & California burns, it is the same thing-and then he comes to the Federal Government for $$$ help. No more.”
Trump’s preference for sending money to red areas over blue ones has been evident at other points, too. After a series of 2018 hurricanes, Trump told officials he didn’t want a single dollar to go to especially hard-hit Puerto Rico, The Washington Post reported, and that he wanted more money to instead go to Florida and Texas. After the covid pandemic hit, Trump repeatedly questioned providing aid to Democratic-run areas, which were more severely impacted early on. He called a relief bill “a big bailout for badly run Democratic cities and states.”
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“Trump absolutely didn’t want to give aid to California or Puerto Rico purely for partisan politics — because they didn’t vote for him,” Kevin Carroll, a former senior counselor to Trump’s then-Homeland Security Secretary John Kelly, told the Guardian in October. Harvey, former Mike Pence aide Olivia Troye and former Trump White House press secretary Stephanie Grisham backed up that account. Grisham told the New York Times around the same time that Trump “did that basically if there ever was a disaster and a state needed disaster aid.” She added, “One of his first questions would be: Are they my people?”
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Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) in his 2023 book also recounted how a discussion of hurricane aid to Florida’s panhandle centered on its political support for Trump. “This is Trump country — and they need your help,” DeSantis said he told Trump. “They love me in the Panhandle,” Trump replied, according to DeSantis. “I must have won 90 percent of the vote out there. Huge crowds. What do they need?” Trump soon signed an order directing FEMA to pay 100 percent of most disaster costs in Florida — after two months earlier issuing a veto threat over a similar proposal for Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands, Politico reported.
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https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2025/01/09/campaign-moment/
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