NO LIMITS — During President Donald Trump’s meeting today with local officials in western North Carolina today, he wasted little time blaming former President Joe Biden for what he said was a poor federal response to Hurricane Helene. “Biden did a bad job,” Trump insisted during a roundtable in the town of Fletcher, while also suggesting that federal aid was denied to homes with Trump signs in their yard. “This is totally unacceptable, and I’ll be taking strong action.” After his brief visit in North Carolina, he traveled to Los Angeles to survey damage from the wildfires in the area. He told reporters he’ll consider conditioning aid based on the state’s willingness to implement voter ID and alter its water policies. The attack on his predecessor, the trafficking in internet rumors to score partisan points, the suggestion that federal disaster assistance is contingent on political concessions — all of it exemplifies how the president is reengineering the politics of disaster aid on the fly. He’s changing how Americans understand the government’s role in responding to extreme weather events and rewriting the rules on how politicians must manage them. Natural disasters have always had a political element to them, even if it wasn’t publicly acknowledged. In 2004, as a series of hurricanes hammered Florida, then-President George W. Bush’s quick response helped him to win the state by 381,000 votes, a dramatic improvement from four years earlier. A year later, his administration’s sluggish response to Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans helped sink his political fortunes. Disaster management could burnish or ruin political reputations, but it rarely was the subject of political warfare itself. Trump has changed that. No event, no matter how catastrophic, is off limits. In his transactional approach, every hurricane, wildfire or tornado is a chance to shore up the base or punish enemies. In the nascent stages of his first campaign for president, he made traditional bipartisan cooperation on disaster relief look weak and feckless. He hammered former New Jersey GOP Gov. Chris Christie for his embrace of then-President Barack Obama in the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy in 2012. “It was unbelievable. He was like a little boy. ‘Oh, I’m with the president,’” Trump said derisively during a rally in Nashua, New Hampshire in 2015. Once he entered the White House and was responsible for managing disasters himself, he used them as an opportunity to attack his political rivals, especially when it looked like they put him on the back foot. When hurricanes Irma and Maria hit Puerto Rico in 2017, Trump traveled to the island and threw paper towels to a waiting crowd, a gesture that was roundly attacked by local politicians and the media. Rather than back down or apologize, Trump lashed out at San Juan Mayor Carmen Yulín Cruz — a Trump critic — arguing that she “really did not do a very good job — in fact did a very poor job.” The episode was a distillation of his broad political ethos: No event, no matter how tragic, and no individual, is sacrosanct. Everything is an opportunity. Everyone is fair game. It’s no happenstance that Trump’s first trip since taking the oath of office is a disaster-related swing around the country. After his brief visit in North Carolina, he’ll survey damage from wildfires in Los Angeles, where his ongoing duel with California Gov. Gavin Newsom, one of Trump’s most outspoken critics and a potential 2028 Democratic hopeful, will be center stage. In part, that’s because Trump has applied his theory of disaster politics to California in the past. Former White House advisers to Trump have said he hesitated to provide disaster aid to California during his first term because of the state’s Democratic leanings, though he ultimately reversed his decision. This time around, Trump has already lashed out at Newsom, repeatedly blaming him for poor forest management and referring to him as “Newscum” in various social media posts. Newsom said he would be ready to greet Trump when he lands in LA, even without an invite from the White House. “I look forward to being there on the tarmac to thank the president, welcome him, and we’re making sure that all the resources he needs for a successful briefing are provided to him,” Newsom said to reporters on Thursday. It’s the kind of boilerplate statement that any elected official might have made in the past when a president arrived for a damage assessment tour. But in this case, it might also be a sign of adaptation to the new politics of natural disasters. There’s nothing in that statement to fuel a counterattack from Trump, no acknowledgement of the enmity between the two. It’s a tacit recognition that the only way to win against Trump, at the moment, is not to play the game. Or at least pick your spots. When Trump touched down at LAX this evening, Newsom was there to greet him. Recognizing the optics of the fraught moment, both decided to play nice. “We’re going to need your help. You were there for us during COVID. I don’t forget that, and I have all the expectations that we’ll be able to work together to get this speedy recovery,” said Newsom. “We will,” responded Trump. “We’re going to get it done.” Welcome to POLITICO Nightly. Reach out with news, tips and ideas at nightly@politico.com. Or contact tonight’s author at cmchugh@politico.com on X (formerly known as Twitter) at @calder_mchugh.
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