In the aftermath of Hurricane Helene, former President Donald Trump has once again shown more leadership in responding to a disaster than the current occupants of the White House. Meanwhile, the media has entirely ignored Joe Biden and Kamala Harris’s disgraceful lack of action.
As rescuers begin to sift through the destruction from one of the worst storms to hit the southeast in living memory, the death toll has already topped 100, with hundreds more still missing. In western North Carolina, where some areas saw as much as 30 inches of rain, entire towns have been wiped off the map by flooding, while others remain only accessible by air.
Trump was on the ground in Georgia on Monday surveying the damage, meeting with first responders and volunteers beginning cleanup efforts. “We’re here today to stand in complete solidarity with the people of Georgia and with all of those suffering in the terrible aftermath of Hurricane Helene,” Trump said.
On his Truth Social platform, Trump added that he would be delivering “a lot of relief material, including fuel, equipment, water, and other things to the State.” He also announced that he had been in communication with Elon Musk to set up Starlink satellite internet for victims amid widespread power outages and destroyed cell phone towers.
Trump’s visit could not have presented a starker contrast to the lethargic – if not outright disinterested – response from the Biden-Harris administration. Though the White House, to its credit, quickly approved disaster declarations for affected states, unlocking some emergency funds, Biden and Harris themselves were completely missing in action.
As vast swaths of the country were decimated by flooding, President Biden – as he has been for so many other disasters, from the Maui wildfires to the toxic train derailment in East Palestine, Ohio – was on the beach in Delaware for a long weekend. When he finally did return to the White House, Biden snapped back at a reporter who asked the president why he was on the beach instead of in Washington. “It’s called a telephone,” he said.
Harris, meanwhile, was on the campaign circuit, including attending a swanky fundraiser in San Francisco.
It was only after Trump said that he would be visiting the affected areas that the White House scrambled to announce plans for Biden to visit as well. Shortly thereafter, Harris’s official account posted a picture on X of the vice president supposedly receiving a briefing from FEMA on Air Force Two – just a few minutes after Trump’s plane touched down in Georgia.
As Daily Mail reporter Charlie Spiering pointed out, Harris’s photo op bears a striking resemblance to the infamous photo of George W. Bush surveying Hurricane Katrina damage from Air Force One in 2005. Yet while Bush was eviscerated by the corporate media, there has been no similar reaction to Harris this time around.
The Helene response is just the latest in a shameful pattern of inaction from the Biden-Harris administration. It took Biden more than a year to visit the East Palestine train derailment site, even though the president found time to fly halfway around the world to Ukraine in the meantime.
In contrast, Trump visited the Ohio town just a few weeks after the incident, along with organizing truckloads of supplies and purchasing lunch for first responders at a local McDonald’s. The former president also directly called out Biden for ignoring the crisis, appearing to prompt increased attention from the administration.
When deadly wildfires decimated the town of Lahaina in Hawaii last August, Biden likewise expressed a callous disinterest, twice telling reporters “no comment” when asked about the disaster while reclining on the beach. The president finally made it to Hawaii weeks later – following a stop at billionaire Tom Steyer’s Lake Tahoe mansion.
In both cases Kamala Harris was nowhere to be seen.
For Harris’s campaign, this latest delayed response has the chance to become something akin to what Hurricane Sandy was for Mitt Romney’s campaign in 2012. That storm, which battered the northeast just weeks before Election Day, gave Barack Obama the chance to seize the national spotlight by beating Romney to the impacted area and flooding the airwaves with footage of the president “looking presidential.” The media also pounced on prior comments from Romney suggesting that he would pursue cuts to FEMA and other federal emergency response operations.
An analysis of exit poll data from the American Enterprise Institute shows Obama’s Hurricane Sandy moment may have made a critical difference for him in the final days of the race, and Romney himself later acknowledged that it was a tough way to close out a campaign.
The effect from Hurricane Helene won’t be exactly the same this time around, primarily because the media is in the tank for Kamala Harris and not Donald Trump. But Americans have always respected leaders who are active and hands-on, something Trump displayed throughout his first term and reminded voters of this week.
Politics aside, Trump’s visit did what presidential visits are supposed to do – lift the spirits of the people picking up the pieces of their broken lives and keep the attention of the country focused on communities in desperate need of assistance. On both of those fronts, Biden and Harris have come up woefully short.
Shane Harris is a writer and political consultant from Southwest Ohio. You can follow him on X @shaneharris513.
