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Yahoo
22-05-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Trump undermined Biden's FEMA in North Carolina. Now the cleanup is lagging on his watch.
Brandon Rogers fielded calls from as far away as Australia as his community strained to recover from the worst natural disaster ever to hit his slice of western North Carolina. Texts poured in by the hundreds. The influx kept the Haywood County commissioner and his staff busy as they coordinated an unimaginable humanitarian recovery. The messages were distractions. Worse, actually: They were the budding flowers of misinformation, seeds that were planted just days after Hurricane Helene killed scores of people, destroyed entire towns and set western North Carolina on an uncertain, unwieldy path to rebuilding. The hollers of western North Carolina are rather insular, with strong community ties owed in some equal measures to its mountainous geography, poor infrastructure and deep well of history. The storm hitting a place like that produced a greatest hits list of conspiracies: The Federal Emergency Management Agency wanted to push people off their land to access lithium deposits; then-President Joe Biden directed the storm to the Republican-heavy area; FEMA assistance was a loan that needed to be repaid at usurious rates. Rogers received a death threat over the county's recovery efforts. An email chain letter claiming 28 babies froze to death in FEMA tents appeared in his inbox. Angry citizens from outside the county poured into a commission meeting demanding answers for tragedies that never occurred. 'It was just people watching this stuff that believed it,' said Rogers, who is a Republican. 'I'd be upset, too, if it's true. But it wasn't true.' The misinformation deterred countless people from seeking federal assistance, according to Rogers and other local officials, legal aid groups and community nonprofits interviewed by POLITICO over the nearly eight months since Helene ravaged a slice of Appalachia that had never before given a Category 4 hurricane any thought. At one point this winter, just 15 percent of eligible North Carolina households had applied for FEMA assistance. While the North Carolina Office of the State Auditor data shows those numbers have improved, major gaps remain: Of the 6,930 people who are eligible for housing assistance because insurance or charities did not cover costs, more than 3,700 people — 53 percent — are not pursuing available federal aid. Disaster experts cautioned against comparing recoveries because they are all unique, but noted that people who refuse federal help often undermine a region's rebound. That is playing out in North Carolina, where thousands of people have foregone assistance that could pay for basic needs, rebuild nearly 1,000 destroyed and 74,000 damaged homes, and put communities mourning the 107 lives lost across the state back together. There was one prominent person seizing on the misinformation for his own purposes: Donald Trump. As a candidate, Trump leveled the baseless accusation that the Biden administration was diverting FEMA assistance from North Carolina to house illegal immigrants. He claimed $1 billion of FEMA spending was 'stolen' for migrants. He said all FEMA had to offer people in North Carolina was $750, which was not true. The allegations spurred anger toward Biden, but FEMA's statistics show no significant uptick in aid since Trump's inauguration. As of April 22, the agency had given nearly $432 million of assistance to 158,600 households in North Carolina, $100 million of which came under Trump, FEMA said in a statement. FEMA also obligated nearly $459 million in public assistance to repair infrastructure in North Carolina, including $138 million under Trump. Meanwhile, Trump's FEMA has halted $10 billion in disaster relief funds intended to help people across the country, cut off housing assistance for thousands of Helene survivors and ended a policy of fully reimbursing the state of North Carolina for debris removal. Now, in further evidence of how political attacks can create a reality of their own, Trump officials are using FEMA's struggles in western North Carolina as a rationale to dismantle the agency. 'I think we're going to recommend that FEMA go away,' Trump said during a January visit to Asheville to survey the damage shortly after taking office. At a congressional hearing on May 6, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, who oversees FEMA, called the agency a failure and reiterated that Trump believes 'FEMA as it exists today should be eliminated.' Trump fired then-acting FEMA chief Cameron Hamilton on May 8, just one day after Hamilton told a House committee the agency should not be abolished. His replacement, David Richardson, warned staff: 'I will run right over you.' Staff reductions, programmatic cuts and leadership changes at FEMA have raised questions about the preparedness of the nation's premier disaster response agency. Its performance will be closely watched as the nation readies for the Atlantic hurricane season, which federal forecasters will preview Thursday. Neither the White House nor FEMA responded to questions about Trump's past claims about FEMA's Helene efforts. DHS also did not respond to requests for comment. As to the president's plans for FEMA, a White House official said the federal government will focus 'on truly catastrophic disasters' while continuing to provide assistance for search-and-rescue missions after devastating events. But the official said state and local governments 'often remain an impediment to their own community's resilience,' and that Trump's policies aim to prod them into more proactive posture. 'States must have adequate emergency management staff, adoption and enforcement of modern building codes, responsible planning and strategic investment to reduce future risk,' the official said, saying states must have their own 'commonsense policies that prioritize preparedness over politics, disaster reserve funds to handle what should be routine emergencies, pre-negotiated mutual aid and contingency contracts that speed up recovery, and above all, an appetite to own the problem.' Whatever the policy merits of Trump's disaster-relief plans, they feel like a bait and switch to some people struggling to recover from Helene: After blaming Biden for faltering relief efforts, Trump has seemed more focused on trashing FEMA than boosting the recovery in North Carolina. Travis Gresham of Canton, a town 20 miles west of Asheville, accuses Trump of setting FEMA up to fail. The president's conspiracy-laced campaign attacks convinced her neighbors to shun the agency, which has delayed reconstruction of a private road and bridge, Gresham said. The surrounding community fell into the false claims like Biden pushed a button to send the hurricane to western North Carolina, that FEMA is merely a tool of the Democratic Party, and that the agency wanted to clear the land for lithium mining. Her neighbors believe everything Trump says because they view him as a 'golden god,' Gresham said. 'He knew what he was doing,' said Gresham, who often votes for Democratic candidates. 'He was setting the stage for what his agenda was: That FEMA is a joke. It's not a good system, but I don't think there's a plan to fix it or overhaul it and make it better. I think it's a plan to eliminate it.' 'If you take the boots off the ground here the people are not going to try to get the help. The help will be over,' Gresham added. 'I don't think we will ever recover here. Not fully.' Immediately after Helene struck, candidate Trump made clear that disaster relief was a federal responsibility and that blame for recovery failures rested with Biden. 'They sacrificed Americans to an Open Border, and now, they have left Americans to drown in North Carolina, Georgia, Tennessee, Alabama, and elsewhere in the South,' he posted Sept. 30 on Truth Social. 'Under this Administration, Americans always come last, because we have 'leaders' who have no idea how to lead!' His criticisms found a receptive audience in western North Carolina, the region's residents said. There's a deep mistrust of the federal government in those rural communities. Locals draw pride from self-sufficiency, maintaining generational ties to the land. It's also nearly devoid of local news outlets, making it the type of environment where anti-government conspiracy theories flourish. 'Appalachia is much more of a mirror of America than we're willing to fully embrace or realize,' said Ryan Eller, executive director of Appalachia Funders Network, a philanthropy that invests in the region. 'We're kind of a canary in a coal mine if we continue to have this degradation of local press, of trust, and allow the response infrastructure for storms not to meet the moment that we're in where these storms are so frequent and destructive.' Trump visited western North Carolina four days after his inauguration, just weeks after Vice President JD Vance toured the region during the presidential transition. It was at that January appearance when Trump first suggested that FEMA should be abolished. Many officials in western North Carolina agree that FEMA needs changing. Even longtime FEMA officials acknowledge that the agency's rules can be cumbersome, especially for people under duress after a catastrophe. Local aid workers familiar with the way FEMA operates said people often mistakenly fail to appeal FEMA denials of assistance, which are routine enough to be more of a feature of the system than a bug. The money comes too slowly, as some people interviewed for this article are still waiting on federal dollars to rebuild after Tropical Storm Fred hit the area in 2021. But those complaints have been overshadowed by the numerous unwieldy conspiracies that sprouted in Helene's aftermath — that FEMA never arrived, that it stole supplies, that it took property, that it ran out of money because it spent it on assisting migrants, former FEMA officials, aid workers and community organizers said. Politicians in red pockets of the country — which absorb far more FEMA assistance than heavily Democratic areas — are walking a fine line. They want FEMA to remain on the ground. But as they decry misinformation and call for reforms, they stop short of blaming Trump for amplifying the very misinformation that now threatens the agency's future. They do not want to offend Trump or his supporters, but now face the challenge of balancing partisan anger with local needs to preserve some semblance of the agency they've loudly criticized. 'I think he's correct in calling out the fact that they failed us,' state Rep. Mark Pless, a Republican, said of Trump. 'It doesn't give credibility to the stories and the lies that are being spread. Just because he said FEMA failed us does not make these stories credible.' Before the misinformation came clear, accurate information from the National Weather Service: Helene would soon bring catastrophic flooding, property damage and death to western North Carolina. The weather service is a part of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the nation's primary climate and weather research service. It's a public-safety agency that informs people of imminent storms. Its meteorologists work in field offices around the country, developing relationships with mayors, local emergency managers and often TV weather people — who are among the most trusted local celebrities, according to polling. The warnings from the National Weather Service office covering western North Carolina proved prescient. Its first post on the social media site X at 12:16 p.m. Sept. 24 stated, 'Tropical Storm #Helene has now formed & will impact us later this week. It is a very large storm & we can expect VERY heavy rainfall & gusty winds.' Less than six hours later, the agency said its confidence of significant flood threats beginning Sept. 26 continued to increase, with 'potential to be an extremely rare event.' Successive posts noted severe flash flooding, strong winds and power outages were likely. On Sept. 25 — one day before Helene hit the Florida panhandle — the weather service predicted between 10 and 15 inches of total rainfall and put the area under a tropical storm warning. North Carolina would meet Helene within 36 hours, the meteorologists cautioned. Helene arrived Sept. 27. The strongest gusts measured up to 105 mph in the southern Appalachian Mountains, according to NOAA's National Hurricane Center. Rainfall between 20 and 31 inches, dropping at rates of 2 to 3 inches per hour, flooded the region's rocky crags. Most of the storm's 34 flash-flood emergencies occurred in western North Carolina. The National Hurricane Center now counts Helene as 'the most devastating natural disaster in western North Carolina's history,' killing 107 people, destroying 822,000 acres of timber land, demolishing or damaging tens of thousands of homes. Helene even forced the temporary closure of NOAA's National Centers for Environmental Information, the Asheville office that produces an annual report of U.S. natural disasters causing $1 billion in damage. (Trump canceled that report and ceased updating its public database this month, citing 'evolving priorities, statutory mandates, and staffing changes.') Just about everyone at the office knows someone who lost their home or a loved one in the storm, NCEI physical scientist Jared Rennie said. Even with an incredibly accurate NWS forecast that gave people days to evacuate, scores of North Carolinians perished. 'I have meteorologist survivor's guilt,' he said. 'It hurts. Even to this day.' Rennie was aware that skepticism of climate change had bred distrust of the federal government in this corner of North Carolina, a mountainous area of rural villages surrounding the city of Asheville, which is noted for its literary past. While affluent Asheville itself is politically liberal, the surrounding area is among the poorest and most conservative in the state. The two hardest hit neighboring counties — Avery and Haywood — voted 76.4 and 61.6 percent for Trump in 2016, 75.8 and 62.5 percent in 2020 and 75.7 and 61.8 percent in 2024, respectively. Rennie sometimes speaks about climate science to rural audiences, and has seen the distrust up close, even as catastrophic storms made the risk to average people more vivid: A collective of researchers using advanced computer models said climate change had made Helene wetter and windier, dramatically increasing the risk to western North Carolina. But the type of misinformation targeting the federal government that Rennie witnessed after Hurricane Helene differed from the climate skepticism he's battled in the past. Community members complained that FEMA was absent when Rennie said he himself had witnessed FEMA officials on the ground. Some of the criticism may have gained credibility from the amount of time it took for FEMA to navigate dangerous terrain and reach far-flung homes. Roads and bridges were destroyed, swallowed by crested rivers or sawed in half by fallen boulders. Entire towns like Swannanoa and Chimney Rock were wiped out. Internet and cellular phone service evaporated. People felt they were on their own. 'Disinformation can spread like wildfire,' Rennie said. 'My personal opinion is that created that whole rift of, 'Oh, FEMA is the bad guy.'' The most pernicious rumor was that Helene survivors could only get $750, a misreading of federal policy. That was the amount that survivors could get under a new FEMA policy introduced in March 2024 to give them immediate cash in addition to other available assistance. It was the first hurricane season with that new funding, which FEMA believed would help build confidence in the agency. But Trump spread the misinformation that $750 was all that FEMA would offer North Carolina residents. 'What's happened there is very bad. They're offering them $750 to people whose homes have been washed away,' Trump said at an Oct. 5 rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, eliciting a round of boos from the crowd. 'And yet we send tens of billions of dollars to foreign countries that most people have never heard of. They're offering them $750. They've been destroyed. These people have been destroyed.' Trump's megaphone became difficult to overcome. 'It was very hard to get past that message that $750 isn't the only assistance available,' said Alicia Edwards, disaster relief project director with Legal Aid for North Carolina, which offers free legal services to low-income residents. 'It was surprising. I wasn't prepared for that.' Unlike Florida, Texas and other coastal areas more prone to hurricanes and accustomed to working with FEMA, western North Carolina had never experienced this level of destruction — or had as much of an occasion to contend with FEMA's bureaucracy. Elderly and less tech-savvy residents struggled to navigate it. Many people gave up when they hit common FEMA obstacles, such as providing specific documentation, Edwards and other local aid workers said. Other survivors came to believe falsehoods that FEMA assistance was a government loan. In more sinister versions, FEMA would take children or property if people could not repay those fictitious loans. Scores of residents chose to live in tents on their property to ward off FEMA, said Rogers, the Haywood County commissioner. There were claims that ranged from ridiculous to the tin-foil-hat variety: That FEMA was never there at all or that its officials were absconding with people's personal supplies and tents, according to residents, aid workers and a review of internet rumors. Even months after the storm, the perception that FEMA worked against the interests of reeling North Carolina communities lingers. Bobby Minor is a 71-year-old man who lived in the Asheville area before moving 140 miles to the east to Advance, which was not directly affected by the hurricane. In an effort to help his former neighbors, he and his wife brought and delivered basic goods on several trips to the areas since Helene hit. He said in an interview that under the Biden administration, FEMA had purposely stinted on aid to the conservative mountainous region, claiming that the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers first appeared one week after Trump's January visit. (In fact, the Army Corps said it arrived in the state Sept. 26 to establish operational support for FEMA and arrived in western North Carolina by Sept. 29.) 'Most people say, 'We haven't even seen them,'' Minor said of FEMA. 'Sounds like that is almost by design.' As those perceptions of being left behind quickly swelled into anti-FEMA sentiment, politicians seized on the opportunity to capitalize on the growing distrust of government officials at every level of government, local officials said. In Haywood County, commissioner Terry Ramey joined a YouTube channel run by Tennessee-based influencer John Ward, which was the source of many false claims. On the channel, Ramey asserted that the county itself had blocked temporary shelter for Helene survivors. The county's four other commissioners and Pless, the county's state representative, rebuked Ramey. Neither Ward nor Ramey responded to requests for comment. 'I've sat back there and I've kind of vibrated while I've watched this show — and this is a show. And there are a lot of people sitting in this room that need to go home,' Pless said at the meeting. 'Terry, this is to you: You can sit there all day long, and you can say you ain't started nothing. Everybody knows it's a lie. The bad part is is these people are going to turn on you the second that you don't do something they want to do.' Inflamed by the anti-government sentiments, several citizen groups interfered with FEMA's delivery of humanitarian-relief supplies when they continued their own supply runs out of the Hickory, Lincolnton and Statesville airports even after the state asked them to stand down, said Mark Bumgarner, executive director of Catawba County United Way. He said those groups of citizens hoped to throttle FEMA's operations because they did not believe its aid would reach local people. 'This got a bit tricky for us as politicians who were involved with these groups at the airports,' Bumgarner wrote in an email. 'Don't get me wrong, the citizen groups provided a much-needed service the first couple of days before FEMA could fully mobilize. But in the developing FEMA involvement, I was shocked they were feeding misinformation to folks looking to donate.' It didn't help that Trump 'utilized fear' to politicize the disaster, said Amber Dixon, director of community health initiatives at the Boone, North Carolina-based Western Youth Network. 'I'll be there shortly, but don't like the reports that I'm getting about the Federal Government, and the Democrat Governor of the State, going out of their way to not help people in Republican areas,' Trump wrote Sept. 30 on Truth Social. That same day, he said on Fox News that, 'They're being treated very badly in the Republican areas. … They're not getting water, they're not getting anything.' Dixon said she worried that politicization would prolong the area's recovery by dissuading people from pursuing help — fears that have since come to pass. 'If you look at the number of FEMA applications versus the number of impacted households, there's a huge discrepancy,' she said just days before Trump's January inauguration. 'It's a numbers game. If you continually tell someone that you don't need something, then that resource will, by default, go away.' Donella Pressley has heard it all. 'If you didn't see them you had your blinders on, because they were here,' Pressley said of FEMA. The 50-year-old Canton resident has zero reason to defend FEMA. She's spent several frustrating years working with the agency trying to rebuild a home destroyed by Tropical Storm Fred in 2021. Since that time, Pressley and her two children have bounced between staying with friends and in hotels. Last year, FEMA finally began disbursing money. The money stopped when Trump took over — FEMA ceased paying hotel bills for thousands of North Carolinians this winter. Pressley said FEMA needs simplifying and fixing, sure. But 'that doesn't start with getting rid of it,' she said. 'It works for some. It may not be working for everyone. But I don't see disasters stopping.' Even some FEMA critics at Helene's ground zero, which was 30 minutes east of Pressley's home, said they need the agency's help. Congressional Republicans also said they don't want FEMA to disappear from the scene entirely. Yet the misinformation that swirled around FEMA after Helene has further politicized the agency, shaking its foundation as the nation's premier first responders to climate-fueled disasters. 'FEMA shouldn't really be subject to political debates or even the tides that shift from ideological pole to pole,' said Eller, of the Appalachia Funders Network. 'I don't think disasters are partisan, and so the recovery shouldn't be either. And I just think that FEMA needs stable, sufficient funding to operate at the scale of today's climate reality and the demands of our communities.' Now, western North Carolina continues to suffer, but it is unclear how much longer FEMA officials will remain on the ground. Ending FEMA's role in long-term recovery would remove from western North Carolina the scores of officials assisting people like Pressley in processing forms for housing assistance from earlier disasters. Officials would have to end or cut back on efforts to help communities plan early for ways to rebuild bridges and roads, restore power grids and clear debris. The changes are already happening. On March 29, FEMA pulled out of its North Carolina disaster recovery centers without explanation. In April, it stopped providing 100 percent reimbursement for state recovery expenses, leaving North Carolina to figure out how it will pay for the rest of its work. Trump's FEMA has closed the spigot on other funds, too. It halted disbursement from $10 billion of disaster relief programs to assess whether those funds flow to illegal immigrants — an evolution of the misinformation that Trump himself spouted on the campaign trail. A FEMA retreat would hurt North Carolinians struggling to recover from Helene, said Max Gibbons, director of pro bono services with Pisgah Legal Services. He acknowledged many 'hiccups' in FEMA's cumbersome process, but insisted that state and local governments cannot fill the void. 'We see that every single day where FEMA is their one source of recovery,' Gibbons said of his clients, many of whom have endured generations of family poverty. 'Without the federal funding it would be difficult for the state to meet the need.' Those needs will grow. Climate change has intensified and made events like Helene more frequent — some of the FEMA officials deployed to North Carolina were in Florida just days before to respond to Hurricane Milton. More people now live in areas vulnerable to disasters like hurricanes, floods and wildfires than ever before. Last year, the U.S. experienced 27 disasters totaling $1 billion in damage. It was the second-highest number of such events in one year, behind only the 28 in 2023. Trump's FEMA is cutting programs that would blunt the effects of those storms, said Michael Coen, who was FEMA chief of staff in the Obama and Biden administrations. In April, FEMA canceled billions of dollars in funding for the Building Resilient Infrastructure and Communities program that started in Trump's first term, steering funding away from projects designed to reduce damage before disasters strike. Coen noted Trump also took an unprecedented step by withholding hazard mitigation grant funding in an April disaster declaration for Virginia, a largely routine measure that unlocks money to safeguard infrastructure from future disasters. Efforts to buy flooded homes from residents seeking to move on from vulnerable properties may also fall victim to Trump's cuts, Coen added. Congress increased that funding with $3.5 billion in the 2021 bipartisan infrastructure law, but much of it remains unspent. The rumors of FEMA taking North Carolina property against people's will damage the program's reputation. On top of that, seasoned FEMA leaders are expected to be pushed out or laid off amid the massive cuts and reorganization, said a former senior FEMA official who was granted anonymity to avoid retribution. That could leave the agency unprepared for the hurricane season that begins June 1. Some past leaders believe FEMA has been stretched too thin by increasingly frequent disasters and needs to be streamlined, with some of its functions passed off to other federal agencies. Brock Long, who ran FEMA in the first Trump administration, told a climate tech conference in Washington last month that the agency has become 'a dumping ground for all the nation's complex problems,' ranging from dealing with unhoused populations to restoring power grids. He said states and private insurers need to shoulder more of the load. But he said the federal government should maintain a role. 'It's a relatively misunderstood agency with great intentions,' he said at the April event. Many simply want speedier responses to disasters that pile up one on top of the other. They want less bureaucracy to get money for rebuilding. 'We had folks here that were literally boots on the ground the morning after the storm,' Rogers said of FEMA. 'Unless they've got the open checkbook at that moment it's like, 'What are you doing?'' Rogers intimately understands the many levels of frustration in the response, but he has also seen what ills can come of government skepticism. He stared them in the face at a three-plus hour Dec. 2, 2024, commission meeting, where he responded to accusations about FEMA and the county. He ticked off a long list of responses to conspiracies about the county and FEMA: 'There has been zero kids took out of a tent, a camper, anything because of this flood situation' and 'we do not want to seize anybody's property,' among others. Rogers lamented how misinformation besieged and complicated the recovery. How it infiltrated his neighbors' minds and conversations. How it all could contribute to dismantling FEMA — which, for all its faults, is still in the thick of it, trying to get Haywood County back on its feet. 'I would like to see them engage with the system,' Rogers said of his constituents in an interview. 'I want them to get the help that they deserve.' CORRECTION: A previous version of this report misstated Donella Pressley's name.
Politico
22-05-2025
- Politics
- Politico
Trump undermined Biden's FEMA in North Carolina. Now the cleanup is lagging on his watch.
Brandon Rogers fielded calls from as far away as Australia as his community strained to recover from the worst natural disaster ever to hit his slice of western North Carolina. Texts poured in by the hundreds. The influx kept the Haywood County commissioner and his staff busy as they coordinated an unimaginable humanitarian recovery. The messages were distractions. Worse, actually: They were the budding flowers of misinformation, seeds that were planted just days after Hurricane Helene killed scores of people, destroyed entire towns and set western North Carolina on an uncertain, unwieldy path to rebuilding. The hollers of western North Carolina are rather insular, with strong community ties owed in some equal measures to its mountainous geography, poor infrastructure and deep well of history. The storm hitting a place like that produced a greatest hits list of conspiracies: The Federal Emergency Management Agency wanted to push people off their land to access lithium deposits; then-President Joe Biden directed the storm to the Republican-heavy area; FEMA assistance was a loan that needed to be repaid at usurious rates. Rogers received a death threat over the county's recovery efforts. An email chain letter claiming 28 babies froze to death in FEMA tents appeared in his inbox. Angry citizens from outside the county poured into a commission meeting demanding answers for tragedies that never occurred. 'It was just people watching this stuff that believed it,' said Rogers, who is a Republican. 'I'd be upset, too, if it's true. But it wasn't true.' The misinformation deterred countless people from seeking federal assistance, according to Rogers and other local officials, legal aid groups and community nonprofits interviewed by POLITICO over the nearly eight months since Helene ravaged a slice of Appalachia that had never before given a Category 4 hurricane any thought. At one point this winter, just 15 percent of eligible North Carolina households had applied for FEMA assistance. While the North Carolina Office of the State Auditor data shows those numbers have improved, major gaps remain: Of the 6,930 people who are eligible for housing assistance because insurance or charities did not cover costs, more than 3,700 people — 53 percent — are not pursuing available federal aid. Disaster experts cautioned against comparing recoveries because they are all unique, but noted that people who refuse federal help often undermine a region's rebound. That is playing out in North Carolina, where thousands of people have foregone assistance that could pay for basic needs, rebuild nearly 1,000 destroyed and 74,000 damaged homes, and put communities mourning the 107 lives lost across the state back together. There was one prominent person seizing on the misinformation for his own purposes: Donald Trump. As a candidate, Trump leveled the baseless accusation that the Biden administration was diverting FEMA assistance from North Carolina to house illegal immigrants. He claimed $1 billion of FEMA spending was 'stolen' for migrants. He said all FEMA had to offer people in North Carolina was $750, which was not true. The allegations spurred anger toward Biden, but FEMA's statistics show no significant uptick in aid since Trump's inauguration. As of April 22, the agency had given nearly $432 million of assistance to 158,600 households in North Carolina, $100 million of which came under Trump, FEMA said in a statement. FEMA also obligated nearly $459 million in public assistance to repair infrastructure in North Carolina, including $138 million under Trump. Meanwhile, Trump's FEMA has halted $10 billion in disaster relief funds intended to help people across the country, cut off housing assistance for thousands of Helene survivors and ended a policy of fully reimbursing the state of North Carolina for debris removal. Now, in further evidence of how political attacks can create a reality of their own, Trump officials are using FEMA's struggles in western North Carolina as a rationale to dismantle the agency. 'I think we're going to recommend that FEMA go away,' Trump said during a January visit to Asheville to survey the damage shortly after taking office. At a congressional hearing on May 6, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, who oversees FEMA, called the agency a failure and reiterated that Trump believes 'FEMA as it exists today should be eliminated.' Trump fired then-acting FEMA chief Cameron Hamilton on May 8, just one day after Hamilton told a House committee the agency should not be abolished. His replacement, David Richardson, warned staff: 'I will run right over you.' Staff reductions, programmatic cuts and leadership changes at FEMA have raised questions about the preparedness of the nation's premier disaster response agency. Its performance will be closely watched as the nation readies for the Atlantic hurricane season, which federal forecasters will preview Thursday. Neither the White House nor FEMA responded to questions about Trump's past claims about FEMA's Helene efforts. DHS also did not respond to requests for comment. As to the president's plans for FEMA, a White House official said the federal government will focus 'on truly catastrophic disasters' while continuing to provide assistance for search-and-rescue missions after devastating events. But the official said state and local governments 'often remain an impediment to their own community's resilience,' and that Trump's policies aim to prod them into more proactive posture. 'States must have adequate emergency management staff, adoption and enforcement of modern building codes, responsible planning and strategic investment to reduce future risk,' the official said, saying states must have their own 'commonsense policies that prioritize preparedness over politics, disaster reserve funds to handle what should be routine emergencies, pre-negotiated mutual aid and contingency contracts that speed up recovery, and above all, an appetite to own the problem.' Whatever the policy merits of Trump's disaster-relief plans, they feel like a bait and switch to some people struggling to recover from Helene: After blaming Biden for faltering relief efforts, Trump has seemed more focused on trashing FEMA than boosting the recovery in North Carolina. Travis Gresham of Canton, a town 20 miles west of Asheville, accuses Trump of setting FEMA up to fail. The president's conspiracy-laced campaign attacks convinced her neighbors to shun the agency, which has delayed reconstruction of a private road and bridge, Gresham said. The surrounding community fell into the false claims like Biden pushed a button to send the hurricane to western North Carolina, that FEMA is merely a tool of the Democratic Party, and that the agency wanted to clear the land for lithium mining. Her neighbors believe everything Trump says because they view him as a 'golden god,' Gresham said. 'He knew what he was doing,' said Gresham, who often votes for Democratic candidates. 'He was setting the stage for what his agenda was: That FEMA is a joke. It's not a good system, but I don't think there's a plan to fix it or overhaul it and make it better. I think it's a plan to eliminate it.' 'If you take the boots off the ground here the people are not going to try to get the help. The help will be over,' Gresham added. 'I don't think we will ever recover here. Not fully.' Immediately after Helene struck, candidate Trump made clear that disaster relief was a federal responsibility and that blame for recovery failures rested with Biden. 'They sacrificed Americans to an Open Border, and now, they have left Americans to drown in North Carolina, Georgia, Tennessee, Alabama, and elsewhere in the South,' he posted Sept. 30 on Truth Social. 'Under this Administration, Americans always come last, because we have 'leaders' who have no idea how to lead!' His criticisms found a receptive audience in western North Carolina, the region's residents said. There's a deep mistrust of the federal government in those rural communities. Locals draw pride from self-sufficiency, maintaining generational ties to the land. It's also nearly devoid of local news outlets, making it the type of environment where anti-government conspiracy theories flourish. 'Appalachia is much more of a mirror of America than we're willing to fully embrace or realize,' said Ryan Eller, executive director of Appalachia Funders Network, a philanthropy that invests in the region. 'We're kind of a canary in a coal mine if we continue to have this degradation of local press, of trust, and allow the response infrastructure for storms not to meet the moment that we're in where these storms are so frequent and destructive.' Trump visited western North Carolina four days after his inauguration, just weeks after Vice President JD Vance toured the region during the presidential transition. It was at that January appearance when Trump first suggested that FEMA should be abolished. Many officials in western North Carolina agree that FEMA needs changing. Even longtime FEMA officials acknowledge that the agency's rules can be cumbersome, especially for people under duress after a catastrophe. Local aid workers familiar with the way FEMA operates said people often mistakenly fail to appeal FEMA denials of assistance, which are routine enough to be more of a feature of the system than a bug. The money comes too slowly, as some people interviewed for this article are still waiting on federal dollars to rebuild after Tropical Storm Fred hit the area in 2021. But those complaints have been overshadowed by the numerous unwieldy conspiracies that sprouted in Helene's aftermath — that FEMA never arrived, that it stole supplies, that it took property, that it ran out of money because it spent it on assisting migrants, former FEMA officials, aid workers and community organizers said. Politicians in red pockets of the country — which absorb far more FEMA assistance than heavily Democratic areas — are walking a fine line. They want FEMA to remain on the ground. But as they decry misinformation and call for reforms, they stop short of blaming Trump for amplifying the very misinformation that now threatens the agency's future. They do not want to offend Trump or his supporters, but now face the challenge of balancing partisan anger with local needs to preserve some semblance of the agency they've loudly criticized. 'I think he's correct in calling out the fact that they failed us,' state Rep. Mark Pless, a Republican, said of Trump. 'It doesn't give credibility to the stories and the lies that are being spread. Just because he said FEMA failed us does not make these stories credible.' Before the misinformation came clear, accurate information from the National Weather Service: Helene would soon bring catastrophic flooding, property damage and death to western North Carolina. The weather service is a part of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the nation's primary climate and weather research service. It's a public-safety agency that informs people of imminent storms. Its meteorologists work in field offices around the country, developing relationships with mayors, local emergency managers and often TV weather people — who are among the most trusted local celebrities, according to polling. The warnings from the National Weather Service office covering western North Carolina proved prescient. Its first post on the social media site X at 12:16 p.m. Sept. 24 stated, 'Tropical Storm #Helene has now formed & will impact us later this week. It is a very large storm & we can expect VERY heavy rainfall & gusty winds.' Less than six hours later, the agency said its confidence of significant flood threats beginning Sept. 26 continued to increase, with 'potential to be an extremely rare event.' Successive posts noted severe flash flooding, strong winds and power outages were likely. On Sept. 25 — one day before Helene hit the Florida panhandle — the weather service predicted between 10 and 15 inches of total rainfall and put the area under a tropical storm warning. North Carolina would meet Helene within 36 hours, the meteorologists cautioned. Helene arrived Sept. 27. The strongest gusts measured up to 105 mph in the southern Appalachian Mountains, according to NOAA's National Hurricane Center. Rainfall between 20 and 31 inches, dropping at rates of 2 to 3 inches per hour, flooded the region's rocky crags. Most of the storm's 34 flash-flood emergencies occurred in western North Carolina. The National Hurricane Center now counts Helene as 'the most devastating natural disaster in western North Carolina's history,' killing 107 people, destroying 822,000 acres of timber land, demolishing or damaging tens of thousands of homes. Helene even forced the temporary closure of NOAA's National Centers for Environmental Information, the Asheville office that produces an annual report of U.S. natural disasters causing $1 billion in damage. (Trump canceled that report and ceased updating its public database this month, citing 'evolving priorities, statutory mandates, and staffing changes.') Just about everyone at the office knows someone who lost their home or a loved one in the storm, NCEI physical scientist Jared Rennie said. Even with an incredibly accurate NWS forecast that gave people days to evacuate, scores of North Carolinians perished. 'I have meteorologist survivor's guilt,' he said. 'It hurts. Even to this day.' Rennie was aware that skepticism of climate change had bred distrust of the federal government in this corner of North Carolina, a mountainous area of rural villages surrounding the city of Asheville, which is noted for its literary past. While affluent Asheville itself is politically liberal, the surrounding area is among the poorest and most conservative in the state. The two hardest hit neighboring counties — Avery and Haywood — voted 76.4 and 61.6 percent for Trump in 2016, 75.8 and 62.5 percent in 2020 and 75.7 and 61.8 percent in 2024, respectively. Rennie sometimes speaks about climate science to rural audiences, and has seen the distrust up close, even as catastrophic storms made the risk to average people more vivid: A collective of researchers using advanced computer models said climate change had made Helene wetter and windier, dramatically increasing the risk to western North Carolina. But the type of misinformation targeting the federal government that Rennie witnessed after Hurricane Helene differed from the climate skepticism he's battled in the past. Community members complained that FEMA was absent when Rennie said he himself had witnessed FEMA officials on the ground. Some of the criticism may have gained credibility from the amount of time it took for FEMA to navigate dangerous terrain and reach far-flung homes. Roads and bridges were destroyed, swallowed by crested rivers or sawed in half by fallen boulders. Entire towns like Swannanoa and Chimney Rock were wiped out. Internet and cellular phone service evaporated. People felt they were on their own. 'Disinformation can spread like wildfire,' Rennie said. 'My personal opinion is that created that whole rift of, 'Oh, FEMA is the bad guy.'' The most pernicious rumor was that Helene survivors could only get $750, a misreading of federal policy. That was the amount that survivors could get under a new FEMA policy introduced in March 2024 to give them immediate cash in addition to other available assistance. It was the first hurricane season with that new funding, which FEMA believed would help build confidence in the agency. But Trump spread the misinformation that $750 was all that FEMA would offer North Carolina residents. 'What's happened there is very bad. They're offering them $750 to people whose homes have been washed away,' Trump said at an Oct. 5 rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, eliciting a round of boos from the crowd. 'And yet we send tens of billions of dollars to foreign countries that most people have never heard of. They're offering them $750. They've been destroyed. These people have been destroyed.' Trump's megaphone became difficult to overcome. 'It was very hard to get past that message that $750 isn't the only assistance available,' said Alicia Edwards, disaster relief project director with Legal Aid for North Carolina, which offers free legal services to low-income residents. 'It was surprising. I wasn't prepared for that.' Unlike Florida, Texas and other coastal areas more prone to hurricanes and accustomed to working with FEMA, western North Carolina had never experienced this level of destruction — or had as much of an occasion to contend with FEMA's bureaucracy. Elderly and less tech-savvy residents struggled to navigate it. Many people gave up when they hit common FEMA obstacles, such as providing specific documentation, Edwards and other local aid workers said. Other survivors came to believe falsehoods that FEMA assistance was a government loan. In more sinister versions, FEMA would take children or property if people could not repay those fictitious loans. Scores of residents chose to live in tents on their property to ward off FEMA, said Rogers, the Haywood County commissioner. There were claims that ranged from ridiculous to the tin-foil-hat variety: That FEMA was never there at all or that its officials were absconding with people's personal supplies and tents, according to residents, aid workers and a review of internet rumors. Even months after the storm, the perception that FEMA worked against the interests of reeling North Carolina communities lingers. Bobby Minor is a 71-year-old man who lived in the Asheville area before moving 140 miles to the east to Advance, which was not directly affected by the hurricane. In an effort to help his former neighbors, he and his wife brought and delivered basic goods on several trips to the areas since Helene hit. He said in an interview that under the Biden administration, FEMA had purposely stinted on aid to the conservative mountainous region, claiming that the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers first appeared one week after Trump's January visit. (In fact, the Army Corps said it arrived in the state Sept. 26 to establish operational support for FEMA and arrived in western North Carolina by Sept. 29.) 'Most people say, 'We haven't even seen them,'' Minor said of FEMA. 'Sounds like that is almost by design.' As those perceptions of being left behind quickly swelled into anti-FEMA sentiment, politicians seized on the opportunity to capitalize on the growing distrust of government officials at every level of government, local officials said. In Haywood County, commissioner Terry Ramey joined a YouTube channel run by Tennessee-based influencer John Ward, which was the source of many false claims. On the channel, Ramey asserted that the county itself had blocked temporary shelter for Helene survivors. The county's four other commissioners and Pless, the county's state representative, rebuked Ramey. Neither Ward nor Ramey responded to requests for comment. 'I've sat back there and I've kind of vibrated while I've watched this show — and this is a show. And there are a lot of people sitting in this room that need to go home,' Pless said at the meeting. 'Terry, this is to you: You can sit there all day long, and you can say you ain't started nothing. Everybody knows it's a lie. The bad part is is these people are going to turn on you the second that you don't do something they want to do.' Inflamed by the anti-government sentiments, several citizen groups interfered with FEMA's delivery of humanitarian-relief supplies when they continued their own supply runs out of the Hickory, Lincolnton and Statesville airports even after the state asked them to stand down, said Mark Bumgarner, executive director of Catawba County United Way. He said those groups of citizens hoped to throttle FEMA's operations because they did not believe its aid would reach local people. 'This got a bit tricky for us as politicians who were involved with these groups at the airports,' Bumgarner wrote in an email. 'Don't get me wrong, the citizen groups provided a much-needed service the first couple of days before FEMA could fully mobilize. But in the developing FEMA involvement, I was shocked they were feeding misinformation to folks looking to donate.' It didn't help that Trump 'utilized fear' to politicize the disaster, said Amber Dixon, director of community health initiatives at the Boone, North Carolina-based Western Youth Network. 'I'll be there shortly, but don't like the reports that I'm getting about the Federal Government, and the Democrat Governor of the State, going out of their way to not help people in Republican areas,' Trump wrote Sept. 30 on Truth Social. That same day, he said on Fox News that, 'They're being treated very badly in the Republican areas. … They're not getting water, they're not getting anything.' Dixon said she worried that politicization would prolong the area's recovery by dissuading people from pursuing help — fears that have since come to pass. 'If you look at the number of FEMA applications versus the number of impacted households, there's a huge discrepancy,' she said just days before Trump's January inauguration. 'It's a numbers game. If you continually tell someone that you don't need something, then that resource will, by default, go away.' Donna Pressley has heard it all. 'If you didn't see them you had your blinders on, because they were here,' Pressley said of FEMA. The 50-year-old Canton resident has zero reason to defend FEMA. She's spent several frustrating years working with the agency trying to rebuild a home destroyed by Tropical Storm Fred in 2021. Since that time, Pressley and her two children have bounced between staying with friends and in hotels. Last year, FEMA finally began disbursing money. The money stopped when Trump took over — FEMA ceased paying hotel bills for thousands of North Carolinians this winter. Pressley said FEMA needs simplifying and fixing, sure. But 'that doesn't start with getting rid of it,' she said. 'It works for some. It may not be working for everyone. But I don't see disasters stopping.' Even some FEMA critics at Helene's ground zero, which was 30 minutes east of Pressley's home, said they need the agency's help. Congressional Republicans also said they don't want FEMA to disappear from the scene entirely. Yet the misinformation that swirled around FEMA after Helene has further politicized the agency, shaking its foundation as the nation's premier first responders to climate-fueled disasters. 'FEMA shouldn't really be subject to political debates or even the tides that shift from ideological pole to pole,' said Eller, of the Appalachia Funders Network. 'I don't think disasters are partisan, and so the recovery shouldn't be either. And I just think that FEMA needs stable, sufficient funding to operate at the scale of today's climate reality and the demands of our communities.' Now, western North Carolina continues to suffer, but it is unclear how much longer FEMA officials will remain on the ground. Ending FEMA's role in long-term recovery would remove from western North Carolina the scores of officials assisting people like Pressley in processing forms for housing assistance from earlier disasters. Officials would have to end or cut back on efforts to help communities plan early for ways to rebuild bridges and roads, restore power grids and clear debris. The changes are already happening. On March 29, FEMA pulled out of its North Carolina disaster recovery centers without explanation. In April, it stopped providing 100 percent reimbursement for state recovery expenses, leaving North Carolina to figure out how it will pay for the rest of its work. Trump's FEMA has closed the spigot on other funds, too. It halted disbursement from $10 billion of disaster relief programs to assess whether those funds flow to illegal immigrants — an evolution of the misinformation that Trump himself spouted on the campaign trail. A FEMA retreat would hurt North Carolinians struggling to recover from Helene, said Max Gibbons, director of pro bono services with Pisgah Legal Services. He acknowledged many 'hiccups' in FEMA's cumbersome process, but insisted that state and local governments cannot fill the void. 'We see that every single day where FEMA is their one source of recovery,' Gibbons said of his clients, many of whom have endured generations of family poverty. 'Without the federal funding it would be difficult for the state to meet the need.' Those needs will grow. Climate change has intensified and made events like Helene more frequent — some of the FEMA officials deployed to North Carolina were in Florida just days before to respond to Hurricane Milton. More people now live in areas vulnerable to disasters like hurricanes, floods and wildfires than ever before. Last year, the U.S. experienced 27 disasters totaling $1 billion in damage. It was the second-highest number of such events in one year, behind only the 28 in 2023. Trump's FEMA is cutting programs that would blunt the effects of those storms, said Michael Coen, who was FEMA chief of staff in the Obama and Biden administrations. In April, FEMA canceled billions of dollars in funding for the Building Resilient Infrastructure and Communities program that started in Trump's first term, steering funding away from projects designed to reduce damage before disasters strike. Coen noted Trump also took an unprecedented step by withholding hazard mitigation grant funding in an April disaster declaration for Virginia, a largely routine measure that unlocks money to safeguard infrastructure from future disasters. Efforts to buy flooded homes from residents seeking to move on from vulnerable properties may also fall victim to Trump's cuts, Coen added. Congress increased that funding with $3.5 billion in the 2021 bipartisan infrastructure law, but much of it remains unspent. The rumors of FEMA taking North Carolina property against people's will damage the program's reputation. On top of that, seasoned FEMA leaders are expected to be pushed out or laid off amid the massive cuts and reorganization, said a former senior FEMA official who was granted anonymity to avoid retribution. That could leave the agency unprepared for the hurricane season that begins June 1. Some past leaders believe FEMA has been stretched too thin by increasingly frequent disasters and needs to be streamlined, with some of its functions passed off to other federal agencies. Brock Long, who ran FEMA in the first Trump administration, told a climate tech conference in Washington last month that the agency has become 'a dumping ground for all the nation's complex problems,' ranging from dealing with unhoused populations to restoring power grids. He said states and private insurers need to shoulder more of the load. But he said the federal government should maintain a role. 'It's a relatively misunderstood agency with great intentions,' he said at the April event. Many simply want speedier responses to disasters that pile up one on top of the other. They want less bureaucracy to get money for rebuilding. 'We had folks here that were literally boots on the ground the morning after the storm,' Rogers said of FEMA. 'Unless they've got the open checkbook at that moment it's like, 'What are you doing?'' Rogers intimately understands the many levels of frustration in the response, but he has also seen what ills can come of government skepticism. He stared them in the face at a three-plus hour Dec. 2, 2024, commission meeting, where he responded to accusations about FEMA and the county. He ticked off a long list of responses to conspiracies about the county and FEMA: 'There has been zero kids took out of a tent, a camper, anything because of this flood situation' and 'we do not want to seize anybody's property,' among others. Rogers lamented how misinformation besieged and complicated the recovery. How it infiltrated his neighbors' minds and conversations. How it all could contribute to dismantling FEMA — which, for all its faults, is still in the thick of it, trying to get Haywood County back on its feet. 'I would like to see them engage with the system,' Rogers said of his constituents in an interview. 'I want them to get the help that they deserve.'
Yahoo
05-03-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
CNN poll: Trump address to Congress gets modestly positive marks, changes few minds
The Republican-heavy audience that tuned in to hear President Donald Trump's speech on Tuesday greeted it with tempered positivity, according to a CNN poll conducted by SSRS. Speech-watchers broadly said Trump's policies would take the country in the right direction, with majorities saying the same across five issue areas that were the focus of the president's speech. But fewer expressed strong confidence in Trump to help people like them, use his presidential power responsibly or provide the nation with real leadership. Roughly 7 in 10 speech-watchers said they had at least a somewhat positive reaction to Trump's speech tonight, with a smaller 44% offering a very positive response. That's lower than the 57% of viewers who rated Trump's initial address to Congress very positively eight years ago, or the 51% who said the same of President Joe Biden's initial address in 2021. It also comes just below the 48% 'very positive' rating Trump saw for his 2018 State of the Union. Good marks from speech-watchers are typical for presidential addresses to Congress, which tend to attract generally friendly audiences that disproportionately hail from presidents' own parties. In CNN's speech reaction polls, which have been conducted most years dating back to the Clinton era, audience reactions have always been positive. The pool of people who watched Trump speak on Tuesday was about 14 percentage points more Republican than the general public. The Trump-friendly audience reacted negatively to a protest effort from a Democratic member of Congress. Eight in 10 Americans who watched the speech said they saw Rep. Al Green's interruption of Trump's speech as inappropriate, with just 20% saying the representative from Texas acted appropriately. Green was ejected from the House chamber after continuing to protest following a warning from House Speaker Mike Johnson. Roughly 6 in 10 viewers said in a poll conducted before the speech that they approved of Trump's handling of the presidency overall. By contrast, Trump's approval rating is underwater with the American public as a whole, a CNN poll released Sunday found, with 48% of U.S. adults approving of his performance as president and 52% disapproving. Trump's speech on Tuesday did little to further improve the already-positive perspectives of his audience. In a survey conducted prior to the speech, 61% said they believed his policies would move the country in the right direction; afterward, 66% of the same people said his policies would take the country down the right path. The share who believed Trump has had the right priorities so far stood at 56% prior to the speech and 59% immediately following its conclusion. Half of speech-watchers said they held a lot of confidence in Trump to provide real leadership, while 45% said they had a lot of confidence in him to use his presidential power responsibly, and just 4 in 10 expressed high confidence in his ability to help people like them. Majorities of 65% or more said they had at least some confidence in him across each metric. Trump scored his highest marks of the night for his policies on immigration: 76% of speech-watchers said his proposed policies on that issue would take America in the right direction, compared with closer to 6 in 10 who said the same of his proposals to change how the government works (63%), or his proposed policies on the economy (62%) or tariffs (56%). That's a shift from CNN's polling on his first term speeches, when he consistently rated higher on economic issues than on those related to immigration. Most who tuned in said they thought his proposed policies on foreign affairs would move the country in the right direction (61%). Speech-watchers are also largely aligned with Trump's approach to Ukraine and Russia. Majorities said that based on what they heard in the speech, the president's policies toward Ukraine (63%) and Russia (58%) offered the right amount of support for each country. Sizable minorities, though, see Trump as too supportive of Russia (37%) and not supportive enough of Ukraine (33%). Annual presidential addresses rarely lead to significant shifts in presidential approval among the broader American public, particularly in recent years. Historically, first-year addresses to Congress have tended to be better rated than later State of the Union speeches and more likely than others to result in an approval rating bounce. But Trump, the first president in the era of modern presidential polling to serve nonconsecutive terms, isn't new to the office — and current levels of polarization may also curtail his speech's potential to affect public opinion. The CNN poll was conducted by text message with 431 US adults who said they watched the presidential address on Tuesday, and are representative of the views of speech-watchers only. Respondents were recruited to participate before the speech, and were selected by a survey of members of the SSRS Opinion Panel, a nationally representative panel recruited using probability-based sampling techniques. Results for the full sample of speech-watchers have a margin of sampling error of plus or minus 5.3 percentage points. CNN's Jennifer Agiesta contributed to this report.
CNN
05-03-2025
- Politics
- CNN
CNN poll: Trump address to Congress gets modestly positive marks, changes few minds
The Republican-heavy audience that tuned in to hear President Donald Trump's speech on Tuesday greeted it with tempered positivity, according to a CNN Poll conducted by SSRS. Speech-watchers broadly said Trump's policies would take the country in the right direction, with majorities saying the same across five issue areas that were the focus of the president's speech. But fewer expressed strong confidence in Trump to help people like them, use his presidential power responsibly or provide the nation with real leadership. Roughly 7 in 10 speech-watchers said they had at least a somewhat positive reaction to Trump's speech tonight, with a smaller 44% offering a very positive response. That's lower than the 57% of viewers who rated Trump's initial address to Congress very positively eight years ago, or the 51% who said the same of President Joe Biden's initial address in 2021. It also comes just below the 48% 'very positive' rating Trump saw for his 2018 State of the Union. Good marks from speech-watchers are typical for presidential addresses to Congress, which tend to attract generally friendly audiences that disproportionately hail from presidents' own parties. In CNN's speech reaction polls, which have been conducted most years dating back to the Clinton era, audience reactions have always been positive. The pool of people who watched Trump speak on Tuesday was about 14 percentage points more Republican than the general public. The Trump-friendly audience reacted negatively to a protest effort from a Democratic member of Congress. Eight in 10 Americans who watched the speech said they saw Rep. Al Green's interruption of Trump's speech as inappropriate, with just 20% saying the representative from Texas acted appropriately. Green was ejected from the House chamber after continuing to protest following a warning from House Speaker Mike Johnson. Roughly 6 in 10 viewers said in a poll conducted before the speech that they approved of Trump's handling of the presidency overall. By contrast, Trump's approval rating is underwater with the American public as a whole, a CNN poll released Sunday found, with 48% of U.S. adults approving of his performance as president and 52% disapproving. Trump's speech on Tuesday did little to further improve the already-positive perspectives of his audience. In a survey conducted prior to the speech, 61% said they believed his policies would move the country in the right direction; afterward, 66% of the same people said his policies would take the country down the right path. The share who believed Trump has had the right priorities so far stood at 56% prior to the speech and 59% immediately following its conclusion. Half of speech-watchers said they held a lot of confidence in Trump to provide real leadership, while 45% said they had a lot of confidence in him to use his presidential power responsibly, and just 4 in 10 expressed high confidence in his ability to help people like them. Majorities of 65% or more said they had at least some confidence in him across each metric. Trump scored his highest marks of the night for his policies on immigration: 76% of speech-watchers said his proposed policies on that issue would take America in the right direction, compared with closer to 6 in 10 who said the same of his proposals to change how the government works (63%), or his proposed policies on the economy (62%) or tariffs (56%). That's a shift from CNN's polling on his first term speeches, when he consistently rated higher on economic issues than on those related to immigration. Most who tuned in said they thought his proposed policies on foreign affairs would move the country in the right direction (61%). Speech-watchers are also largely aligned with Trump's approach to Ukraine and Russia. Majorities said that based on what they heard in the speech, the president's policies toward Ukraine (63%) and Russia (58%) offered the right amount of support for each country. Sizable minorities, though, see Trump as too supportive of Russia (37%) and not supportive enough of Ukraine (33%). Annual presidential addresses rarely lead to significant shifts in presidential approval among the broader American public, particularly in recent years. Historically, first-year addresses to Congress have tended to be better rated than later State of the Union speeches and more likely than others to result in an approval rating bounce. But Trump, the first president in the era of modern presidential polling to serve nonconsecutive terms, isn't new to the office — and current levels of polarization may also curtail his speech's potential to affect public opinion. The CNN poll was conducted by text message with 431 US adults who said they watched the presidential address on Tuesday, and are representative of the views of speech-watchers only. Respondents were recruited to participate before the speech, and were selected by a survey of members of the SSRS Opinion Panel, a nationally representative panel recruited using probability-based sampling techniques. Results for the full sample of speech-watchers have a margin of sampling error of plus or minus 5.3 percentage points.
Politico
28-02-2025
- Politics
- Politico
Zohran Mamdani is surging
IS THIS A MAMDANI MOMENT?: While the New York political world braces for former Gov. Andrew Cuomo's imminent entrance into the New York City mayoral race, Zohran Mamdani, the millennial Democratic socialist with a savvy social media sense is enjoying a boomlet. In June, the Queens assemblymember's candidacy announcement in October seemed like a longshot. He's since raised over $3.4 million with public matching funds, collected over 7,000 donations, and boasts an average contribution of $74, which his team says proves true grassroots support. He said he expects to raise $8 million through the city's matching funds program. He also churns out buzzy social media videos and takes unapologetic policy stances, which earn him criticism from rivals that he's unrealistic and unyielding. In short, Mamdani is running strong in the ideological lane of the energized left — a strategy which, when coupled with his criticisms of Israel, would appear to have a ceiling in a New York City Democratic primary, but one that's getting him a lot of attention nonetheless. 'I don't think this movement has a ceiling,' Mamdani told Playbook, noting that Bernie Sanders got 47 percent of the vote in Republican-heavy Staten Island in 2016. 'I do think there's a majority of New Yorkers who feel left behind by the economic policies of this mayoral administration and by the economic policies of today, and they are hungry for a relentless focus on an economic agenda.' Now those who are working to oppose him — and who have been leery of Mamdani's aggressively anti-Israel stances from the start — are worried. 'They're running a really smart operation, this is what I've been warning people about,' said Sara Forman, executive director of the New York Solidarity Network and the treasurer of Solidarity PAC. Both were formed to challenge antisemitic politicians in New York's state and local government and neither is yet involved in the mayor's race at the moment, Forman said. Forman expressed grave concerns about Mamdani's positions against Israel — like when the assemblymember said 'the path toward peace can only begin by ending the occupation and dismantling apartheid' just one day after Hamas' Oct. 7 terrorist attacks in Israel. 'Everybody underestimates it,' she said of his campaign. 'They are going to wake up and he is going to be in a position to potentially be the nominee.' Democratic Rep. Ritchie Torres, who is backing Cuomo, agrees: 'The DSA candidate is treacherously smart and should not be underestimated,' he told Jewish Insider. A poll shared with Playbook — paid for by Mamdani's campaign and executed by EMC Research — shows him making it into the final round of ranked choice voting before Cuomo clears 50 percent. Mamadani's analysis, which quizzed 700 voters by phone, email and text from Jan. 23 to 27, found that Cuomo, City Comptroller Brad Lander, former Comptroller Scott Stringer and Mamdani reach the sixth round of ranked choice voting, in that order. Another poll commissioned by Cuomo-aligned Tusk Strategies this week found Mamdani in second place — an ideal outcome for the moderate ex-governor and anyone looking to fundraise for a PAC that would benefit Cuomo. The Tusk poll showed Mamdani beating out a host of New York insiders — including Mayor Eric Adams — who entered city politics before the Ugandan-born 33-year-old could even vote. 'We always were setting up a campaign that could win this race,' Mamdani told Playbook. 'This is indicative of what we've always thought, which is that there has been a misreading of New York City's electorate, and while there's been so much talk of us moving to the right, I think what people are also missing is that people want to vote for something.' To that end, he was among just three candidates at a forum this week to unequivocally promise a rent freeze — a policy determined by what's supposed to be an independent board of mayoral appointees. The others were state Sen. Jessica Ramos and former Assembly Member Michael Blake, who have yet to qualify for matching funds. A rising Zohran is a good scenario for Cuomo. The former governor would likely find it easy to fundraise in a race that pits the moderate Democrat against a young assemblymember who wants to see the NYPD budget slashed and the minimum wage raised to $30. And Mamdani knows this. 'When we face the inevitable opposition spending because of the audacity to believe in universal human rights, what gives me confidence is I believe the vast majority of New Yorkers want that politics of consistency,' Mamdani said. 'They want to know where politicians stand on an issue, regardless of who it applies to, regardless of who they're speaking about.' He acknowledged the prospect of independent expenditures running ads criticizing him and said, 'they will be competing with our own narrative about this campaign.' On the ground, he has a sprawling operation: the campaign says it's knocked on 56,000 doors, has over 4,000 volunteers and launches between 20 to 30 neighborhood canvasses every week. Not to mention, even decidedly moderate Democrats privately envy his social media operation. Mamdani's campaign tells us his social media is spearheaded by filmmaker duo Melted Solids, who produce videos that lead to over 20.6 million impressions on X, 200,000 likes on TikTok and 8 million Instagram views with 30,000 new followers in the last 90 days. But he's getting heat from some opponents who say his planned expansion of services — like free buses, child care and city-owned grocery stores — would be nearly impossible to pay for. 'I find there's a lot of people that have magic wands in this race,' Lander told the outlet Hell Gate in January. The comptroller once previously joined the Democratic Socialists of America and voted against a budget because it didn't properly defund the NYPD in his estimation. He has taken strides to move toward the center in this election, as some of his former stances are no longer popular, while Mamdani said he doesn't need to moderate his stances to become mayor. Lander told the outlet, 'I have like, 75-page policy plans, not 'freeze the rent' or 'emanate a million homes.'' — Jason Beeferman From the Capitol CUOMO COULD SET RECORD: When Adams began his mayoral term, he declared himself the 'Biden of Brooklyn.' If Andrew Cuomo is elected this fall, he might have a better case to compare himself to Joe Biden. Cuomo would be the 100th man to serve as New York City's mayor. And he would be the oldest ever elected to their first term for the post. Abe Beame is the current record holder. He was 67 years, 9 months and 12 days old when he was sworn in at the start of 1974, besting the mark of 67 years, 9 months and 10 days set by William Lafayette Strong when he became the last pre-consolidation mayor in 1895. Cuomo will be 68 years and 26 days old next New Year's. That would make him the oldest new mayor since at least 1726. The birth certificate for Mayor Robert Lurting — whose tenure was notable for the creation of the city seal and for becoming the first mayor to die in office — seems to have been lost to history, so it's not clear how old he was at the time. Of course, seniority hasn't been a drawback for American politicians in recent years. Biden was 78 years and 2 months old when he was sworn in, setting a record that was broken by President Donald Trump when he took the oath at 78 years and 7 months old last month. Gov. Kathy Hochul, currently 66, became one of the oldest-ever winners of a gubernatorial election in 2024. Cuomo's first foray into mayoral politics was his father's 1977 campaign. Four of the eight highest-polling candidates he could be running against in June were not born before that election. — Bill Mahoney FROM THE DELEGATION NEUTRAL FOR NOW: Reps. Hakeem Jeffries and Adriano Espaillat aren't ready to publicly share their opinions on Cuomo's anticipated foray into the race for New York City mayor this weekend. The New York Democrats tag teamed at an unrelated news conference earlier today in declining to weigh in. 'I have no comment on the possible entry of Governor Cuomo into a mayor's race until he makes that decision,' Jeffries said. 'Same here,' Espaillat said. 'I'm involved in a coalition of leaders, clergy leaders, business leaders and electors that will be listening to any and all the candidates for the mayor's race.' What about the potential candidacy of Adrienne Adams, the City Council's first Black female speaker? 'There's a group of African American elected officials, clergy members, community leaders that I'm in conversation with. I expect that those conversations will accelerate,' Jeffries said, still reserving comment. An endorsement from either congressional official could move votes in their respective districts. Jeffries is a politically moderate Black House minority leader from Brooklyn and Espaillat is the chair of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus representing upper Manhattan and the Bronx. But Jeffries signaled he may stay out of the June primary altogether. (He endorsed Maya Wiley over Eric Adams in 2021.) 'I have no intention at this moment of endorsing anyone until a candidate emerges from the Democratic primary,' he said. Jeffries did have a bit more to say on Cuomo earlier this week in Washington and it was helpful to the former governor. 'I think he'd be a candidate that a lot of people, as I've heard from the district that I represent, would be very interested in checking out,' the House leader told Spectrum News. — Emily Ngo FROM THE CAMPAIGN TRAIL ANTI-CUOMO PAC: A new anti-Cuomo independent expenditure taking shape and reported here for the first time is taking aim at the former governor's calling card, a reputation for being an effective manager, in a three-page memo to 'interested parties.' The memo from New Yorkers for Better Leadership includes news clips critical of Cuomo's handling of Covid, New York City mass transit and tax breaks that failed to produce jobs. The missive could serve as a blueprint for Cuomo's likely Democratic foes when he jumps into the mayoral primary, a move that is expected this weekend. 'In short, Governor Cuomo is not just a bad man, he was a bad governor,' the memo states. 'New Yorkers deserve better leadership, not more of the incompetence and chaos that got us here.' Previous super PAC spending in the long lead up to Cuomo's entrance in the race has not impacted his poll position. And his team believes the Covid leadership record can be a strength for him, while the attacks have been politically motivated as revealed in a DOJ inspector general's report last year. The PAC has hired Lauren Hitt, a longtime Democratic operative who has worked for Kamala Harris, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and longtime Cuomo nemesis Bill de Blasio. The group is yet to disclose its donors, but will do so as required under law. The entity is separate from the group that aired a six-figure radio and digital campaign knocking Cuomo's record. — Nick Reisman IN OTHER NEWS — ICYMI: A deputy mayor for Mike Bloomberg could throw his hat into the mayor's race. (POLITICO) — A GLIMPSE OF MORE CHARGES: Adams was going to be additionally charged with destroying evidence and instructing others to do the same. (The New York Times) — IS AOC UNDER INVESTIGATION?: Trump's border czar Tom Homan asked the attorney general to investigate Democratic Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and now the congressmember wants to know if she's facing a federal probe. (POLITICO) Missed this morning's New York Playbook? We forgive you. Read it here.
