Republicans have launched a host of lies and disinformation throughout the 2024 hurricane season. So far, conservative leaders in heavily affected regions, including Florida and Georgia, have accused the Biden administration of diverting funds from FEMA to assist undocumented immigrants entering the country (a charge that FEMA has fervently rejected), claimed that working with the White House to expedite disaster relief “seemed political,” and have conspiratorially suggested that the hurricanes are a government manipulation.
But the depth and depravity of the Donald Trump–swirled fiction stretches even further, even to the point of harming one of the MAGA leader’s strongest voting blocs.
By Tuesday, it became clear to federal officials that the lie that FEMA was out of money had stopped people from actually requesting their aid in the wake of Hurricane Helene, which devastated large swaths of North Carolina and Georgia.
Speaking with CNN, former Republican communications strategist Douglas Heye lamented how Trump’s own supporters were bearing the brunt of the misinformation.
“The area of North Carolina that was hit is overwhelmingly Republican,” Heye, a North Carolinian, told the network. “By spreading this misinformation, you’re hurting your own voters first. And we know Donald Trump takes his people sort of as a special case, he’s damaging them for his own political goods. That’s malicious.”
But the magnitude of disaster caused by the bold-faced lies will only come to light after the full hurricane season has passed. On the immediate horizon swirls another massive superstorm, Category 5 Hurricane Milton, which is scheduled to slam the west side of Florida by Wednesday evening. Central Floridian leaders have repeatedly warned Milton’s arrival at the Sunshine State’s shores will be a catastrophic event that will claim lives and demolish the region, with forecasted 10-to-15-foot storm surges that Tampa Mayor Jane Castor has described as “not survivable.”
“I can say without any dramatization whatsoever: If you choose to stay in one of those evacuation areas, you’re going to die,” Castor told CNN on Monday, a warning she said she has never issued before.
Speaking with MSNBC on Monday night, Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas said he had “not seen” weather emergency–related inaccuracies “ever before at this level.”
“You and I both remember a time when an extreme weather event, a natural disaster, actually brought people together,” Mayorkas told host and former White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki. “Now, unfortunately, tragically, quite frankly, it is politicized. And what happens is, the people who are victimized by the natural disaster are the ones who will suffer.”
“It sows distrust in their government, and therefore they don’t seek the help that they truly need,” Mayorkas continued. “We have funds to put in their pockets to be able to help them address immediate needs. These individuals are not seeking that relief because of the disinformation, the intentionally false information, they are receiving.”
