‘You’ll be okay’: Trump’s message to Hurricane Helene victims sparks controversy
"People should read Trump’s Project 2025 and how the @Heritage / @Heritage_Action plans to handle hurricanes and other disasters."
Critics tied the recent remark to a proposal in Project 2025, a conservative plan, to privatize weather forecasting now done by government agencies.
Former president and Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump takes questions Friday during a town hall event at Macomb Community College in Warren, Mich. (Emily Elconin/Getty Images)
By Maxine Joselow September 29, 2024 at 7:01 p.m. EDT
The fallout from the devastation caused by Hurricane Helene is entering the political arena, with former president Donald Trump facing scrutiny for his comment that hurricane victims will be “okay” and for conservative proposals to end government weather forecasts.
At a rally Friday in Walker, Mich., Trump said he was thinking of those in Alabama and other states hit by the storm, saying, “We’re with you all the way, and if we were there we’d be helping you. You’ll be okay.”
KamalaHQ, the Harris campaign’s X account, immediately shared the video clip with its roughly 1.3 million followers, suggesting that the former president was downplaying a deadly disaster and showing a lack of empathy.
“You’ll be okay,” the tweet read, along with the parenthetical note, “(Dozens of deaths have already been reported)”.
On and off social media, the campaign and its supporters also hammered Trump for denying human-caused climate change, which scientists say is allowing hurricanes .. https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2022/09/29/ian-hurricane-rapid-intensification-climate/?itid=lk_inline_manual_9 .. such as Helene to rapidly intensify. In addition, Harris allies highlighted that Project 2025 — the road map for a second Trump administration drafted by conservative think tanks in Washington — would privatize weather forecasting now done by federal agencies.
“President Trump is traveling to Georgia to receive an update on the devastation from Hurricane Helene,” Trump campaign spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt said in an email. “Where’s Kamala? Oh, that’s right, she is wining and dining with her radical left donors in San Francisco.”
Leavitt added, “As President Trump has repeatedly said, Project 2025 has nothing to do with him or his campaign.”
---------- [Insert: Damn, that lie, Karoline Leavitt, is long before now past it's use by date, like his lie the 2020 election was stolen from him. Seriously:
The Claremont Institute, of course, is one of the conservative outfits pushing the Agenda 2025 platform Trump, and some of his campaign team, insist upon continually lying about.
"J.D. Vance Apparently Thinks Amazon Funded the Black Lives Matter Movement It’s increasingly hard to believe they vetted this guy."
Could be simply that Trump thought, Vance is so much a younger me that i want him. He may have left the first bit out when he pressured the RNC.
"Who benefits most when small businesses on Main Street are destroyed? Who wants to see their competitors unable to deliver goods and services to people, so that you get it delivered in your brown Amazon box? Jeff Bezos,” Mr. Vance said, referencing the riots that broke out in the summer of 2020, amid a wave of racial justice protests. “The people who are invested in destroying America via our corporate class are also getting rich from it. This is an important piece of the puzzle to understand. P - If you peel back the onion, what you find is that the businesses that are most connected and most devoted to destroying our values are also benefiting financially from it,” he argued in the speech at a conference in suburban Washington, D.C., hosted by the Claremont Institute, a right-wing California think tank that has emerged as an ally of the MAGA movement. P - Please believe that this is not an example of some sort of new conservative “populism.” Vance aimed at Bezos not out of a desire to break Amazon’s monopolistic power in the marketplace but because, by the strange lights of the modern conservative brains, Bezos is guilty of “woke capitalism.”" P - Trump disavows Project 2025, but he has long-standing ties to some key architects [...] But many of Trump’s key allies have been directly involved in producing the project, which includes a 900-plus page policy road map and personnel database gathered by the Heritage Foundation, the conservative think tank leading the effort. IMAGE - President Donald Trump... Trump also spoke highly about the group's plans at a dinner sponsored by the Heritage Foundation in April 2022, saying: “This is a great group, and they’re going to lay the groundwork and detail plans for exactly what our movement will do and what your movement will do when the American people give us a colossal mandate to save America.” P - The project’s website bills it as a “governing agenda” that would “pave the way for an effective conservative Administration.” P - The website also notes that the project is backed by over 100 conservative organizations, many led by close allies of Trump, including Turning Point USA, the Center for Renewing America, the Claremont Institute, the Family Policy Alliance, the Family Research Council, Moms for Liberty and America First Legal — the latter of which is led by Stephen Miller, a top former Trump adviser. P - Former Trump administration officials who have been directly affiliated with Project 2025 include former Office of Management and Budget Director Russ Vought, former acting Defense Secretary Christopher Miller, former Housing and Urban Development Secretary Ben Carson, former deputy chief of staff Rick Dearborn and former Justice Department senior counsel Gene Hamilton. https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=174940216] ----------
Trump has repeatedly denied knowing anything about the blueprint or the people behind it, even though many of its authors held senior roles in his administration and he has praised Project 2025's sponsor, the Heritage Institution. In 2022, Trump addressed a Heritage conference and said of their policy proposals .. https://www.washingtonpost.com/elections/2024/08/07/trump-heritage-project-2025-roberts/?itid=lk_inline_manual_15 , “They’re going to lay the groundwork and detail plans for exactly what our movement will do.”
Project 2025 describes the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the parent agency of the National Weather Service, as “one of the main drivers of the climate change alarm industry.” The blueprint also argues that the Federal Emergency Management Agency, which has played a central role in responding to Helene, should cover less of the costs of disasters.
Project 2025 would “kill the National Weather Service (NWS) and … kill emergency disaster funding for state/local govts,” the Lincoln Project, a group formed by disaffected Republicans, wrote on X .. https://x.com/ProjectLincoln/status/1839754239259607248 . “Trump’s not just stupid, he’s dangerous.”
The plan does not propose eliminating NWS, which provides weather and climate forecasts and warnings for the United States and its territories. Rather, the plan suggests that the agency “should fully commercialize its forecasting operations” like outlets such as AccuWeather and the Weather Channel.
Some former Trump administration officials say they don’t share Project 2025’s vision for federal weather agencies, nor would they expect Trump to embrace them during a second term.
“There is 0% chance that anything in Project 2025 related to NOAA or weather will ever be considered or implemented,” Ryan Maue, a meteorologist who briefly served as NOAA’s chief scientist under Trump, wrote on X.
Project 2025 says little about the National Hurricane Center, another office within NOAA that provides lifesaving storm forecasts. The document suggests that the White House should “review the work of the National Hurricane Center” and that “data collected by the department should be presented neutrally, without adjustments intended to support any one side in the climate debate.”
[And you should never support the idea the earth is more round than flat.]
Trump has repeatedly called climate change a “hoax.” During a news conference in New York on Thursday, he argued that “nuclear warming” poses a greater threat to humanity than global warming, echoing comments he made during an August conversation with billionaire Elon Musk .. [After Trump downplayed the threat of global warming, Musk addressed the issue of climate change minutes later, saying efforts to address it should happen without “demonizing people.” “It’s not like the house is on fire immediately,” Musk said. [...]Some research has predicted catastrophic levels of climate change in less than a decade if countries do not significantly reduce their pollution. Trump suggested to Musk that he feels little urgency to curb fossil fuel use and speculated that the world has “100 to 500 years left.”] https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2024/08/12/trump-returns-x-elon-musk-interview/?itid=lk_inline_manual_26 .
“What [Democrats] should start mentioning is nuclear warming because we’re in grave danger,” the former president said. “That’s the warming you’re going to have to be very careful with.”
It is unclear what Trump means by “nuclear warming.” He could be referring to the possibility of nuclear war with Russia, which experts say would actually cool the planet’s climate.
During his first term, Trump faced criticism for his handling of major hurricanes. In 2018, he casually tossed rolls of paper towels into a crowd in San Juan, Puerto Rico, after the island was devastated by Hurricane Maria a year earlier.
In a 2019 incident that became known as Sharpiegate, Trump used a marker to modify a NOAA forecast map and incorrectly suggest Hurricane Dorian could affect Alabama. An investigation later found political influence led NOAA to release a statement backing Trump’s false claim and undermining its own forecast.
“Trump has made it crystal clear that he will respond to climate disasters exactly the same way he did during his presidency,” Pete Jones, rapid response director at the liberal strategic communications firm Climate Power, said in an email.
Maxine Joselow is a staff writer who covers climate change and the environment. follow on X @maxinejoselow
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