Convicted felon former President Trump on Thursday morning woke up and decided he might as well stir up some more falsehoods and bullshit about the response to Hurricane Helene’s deadly flooding in the Southeast, posting “Kamala and Sleepy Joe are universally being given POOR GRADES for the way that they are handling the Hurricane, especially in North Carolina. It is going down as the WORST AND MOST INCOMPETENTLY MANAGED ‘STORM,’ AT THE FEDERAL LEVEL, EVER SEEN BEFORE – BUT THEIR MANAGEMENT OF THE BORDER IS WORSE!” on Truth Social.
Maybe here is where we’d bring up Hurricane Katrina as an example of a mismanaged federal response to a storm. Or maybe Hurricane Maria, where much of Puerto Rico was destroyed and Trump himself didn’t give a fuck since those people don’t vote. Or his COVID response which for some reason he gets a pass on. But we can skip past that and speculate on what his game is here.
Would Trump be lying about the response if Alabama and Mississippi had been hit instead? Who knows. We know he didn’t give a shit about the 2021 ice storm that crippled Texas. He did make a big scene over the 2023 East Palestine trainwreck in Ohio, but keep in mind that was less than a mile from the Pennsylvania border, and the chemical plume very easily could have affected Keystone staters too. This close to the election yeah he probably have still made a scene an accused President Biden of purposely holding back on a federal response if hard red states had been hit.
But in this world it may actually be panic-driven, as an analysis by the Washington Post’s Phil Bump lays out what the fat fuck’s minions may have told him: If you subtracted the votes from all the counties in which disasters have been declared in North Carolina and Georgia from the 2020 election results then Biden would have won them by over 3 percent and 1 percent, respectively, rather than losing North Carolina by about 1 percent and winning Georgia by 0.25 percent or whatever it was. This is existential for Trump to get the affected, particularly in North Carolina, angry and motivated to turn out even if their lives have been completely upended and in all likelihood tens of thousands will still be without electricity and running water come November 5th.
You’re most welcome!
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) October 3, 2024
Problem is that this isn’t Katrina, at least not yet, and it’s going to take a hell of a propaganda operation to turn it into a repeat. Affected partisans are still definitely going to scream bloody murder on social media and plenty are already. Then there’s that obviously turnout is not going to be zero in these counties. It’s also extremely unlikely to exceed 2020 levels as displacement and disruption take their toll, so in the end if Harris ends up taking North Carolina the flooding will have been a major reason why. Trump’s right to freak out about his precious voters suffering so dearly.