President Biden will travel to Raleigh, N.C., on Wednesday for a meeting with the Emergency Operations Center and to view damage from Hurricane Helene.
Biden told reporters he’ll also take an aerial tour with Gov. Roy Cooper (D). The president said he’d visit Georgia and Florida to survey damage “as soon as possible.”
- The death toll from Hurricane Helene has topped 130, and more than 600 remain missing.
- Tens of thousands across the southeast still do not have power, and travel is difficult, with many roads washed out or filled with debris.
- Scores of people have lost homes and businesses, and distributing aid to stranded citizens in mountain towns of North Carolina is challenging.
The Hill’s Katie Wadington filed a dispatch from her home in Asheville. The whole thing is worth reading, but here’s a snippet that captures the horrific devastation:
“Buzzing chainsaws and growling generators have replaced the everyday suburban sounds of lawnmowers and birds in my neighborhood about 12 miles south of flooded parts of town. Waves of acrid smoke, from the burning of wet wood, filled the air. We woke up Sunday with no running water, but fortunately had filled the tub and every water bottle we owned the night before, based on a warning from a seven-year-old the day before.”
Former President Trump visited Georgia on Thursday, where he swiped at the Biden administration’s response as inadequate.
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Trump accused both Biden and Vice President Harris of not taking the storm seriously because neither were in Washington, D.C. over the weekend.
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The former president launched a GoFundMe that has raised more than $3 million.
Harris is expected to interrupt some of her previously scheduled campaign appearances this week to visit Georgia and North Carolina.
- Harris will travel to Georgia on Wednesday and then to North Carolina “in the coming days,” according to a White House official.
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Harris cut a weekend campaign swing through Nevada short to fly back to Washington on Monday, where she was briefed by the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA).
Biden and Harris have hit back at Trump, who falsley claimed that Biden was not taking calls from elected officials on the ground.
Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp (R) praised the federal response after talking to Biden over the weekend.
“He just said, ‘Hey, what do you need?’ And I told him, you know, we got what we need. We will work through the federal process. He offered that if there’s other things we need, just to call him directly, which, I appreciate that. But we’ve had FEMA embedded with us since, you know, a day or two before the storm hit.”
Not all Republicans feel that way...
Rep. Chuck Edwards (R-N.C.), who represents a Western swing-district in the state, told NewsNation anchor Blake Burman that the federal response has been “disappointing.”
“We [began] to see some … some resources brought in today, but the storm was over about 80 hours ago. The storm was over about 10 a.m. on Friday. We knew that the storm was coming, and only today are we beginning to see the first … [FEMA] employees and trailers and … helicopters…the people in Western North Carolina feel let down, deservedly so.”
The Hill’s Alexander Bolton reports on how the hurricane has scrambled politics in three critical battlegrounds — North Carolina, Georgia and Florida — just more than a month out from the election.
Bolton writes: “The storm’s damage has drawn early comparisons to Katrina, the hurricane that killed more than 1,000 people in New Orleans and surrounding Louisiana in 2005 and became an albatross for then-President George W. Bush. In races that could be decided by a few thousand, or even a few hundred, votes, any response that could be perceived as uncaring, tone-deaf or incompetent could be devastating.”
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