WESTERN FLORIDA—First it was Hurricane Helene, now it’s Hurricane Milton. In both storms, Trump and his MAGA acolytes have been and are circulating false claims about relief not going to Republican areas and conspiracy theories that are messing up effective and life-saving responses to the storms.
Marjorie Taylor Greene and others have been circulating conspiracy theories that make the tales in Alice-in-Wonderland look mild.
First, the real news: Milton, described now by meteorologists as the super storm long predicted to happen as a result of global warming, is forecast to come ashore in the Tampa-St. Petersburg, Fla., area as a Category 4 storm on Wednesday night, October 9. It’s forecast to move across all of central Florida through Thursday and head east, still a hurricane, into the Atlantic.
Statewide alerts and warnings have been issued, along with evacuation orders for the most-threatened areas. After some delay, the Disney theme parks around Orlando closed. So did the offices of the two Unite HERE locals which represent their tens of thousands of workers.
Just days before, Helene roared through the Southeast, killing more than 200 people in Florida, Georgia, and the Carolinas and causing more than $100 billion in damage, as far inland as Asheville, N.C.., in the state’s western mountains. Hundreds are still missing.
A fully developed hurricane releases heat energy equivalent of a 10-megaton nuclear bomb every 20 minutes—more than all the energy used at a given time, National Hurricane Center tropical analysis chief Chris Landsea reported.
Which leaves people to pick up the pieces of their shattered lives. Trump’s lies and the conspiracy theorists are getting in the way of people dealing with the tragedy as Trump, Greene, and others of their ilk mess things up.
In Trump’s case, he is making political hay out of the disasters in the leadup to the election. Many in desperate need of aid are avoiding applying for it because of Trump’s charges that if they live in Republican areas they will not get federal help. That, of course, is projection because when Trump was president he withheld federal aid to victims of disasters in areas he said had people who did not support his election.
Even the Republican governors in the affected states, Florida, Georgia, and both Carolinas, dismiss the Trump claims and the conspiracy mongers. They also praise federal relief efforts underway.
And Democratic President Joe Biden bluntly told reporters on October 8 that such conspiracy theories are lies. “They’re ‘un-American’ and dangerous to people’s lives,” he added.
Doesn’t stop Trump
That doesn’t stop Trump, Greene, and other conspiracy chatterers. It’s also par for the course for the convicted felon former president. After all, Trump took his black Sharpie—the marker he used to “sign” coronavirus relief checks—and used it to “redirect” Hurricane Dorian into Alabama five years ago.
Trump, looking at a hurricane map which showed Dorian north of Puerto Rico and headed northwest towards the east coast of Florida, tweeted that deep-red Alabama would be one state “likely to be hit much harder than anticipated.”
The National Weather Service office in Birmingham, Ala., corrected him online. It tweeted “Alabama will NOT see any impacts from #Dorian. We repeat, no impacts from Hurricane #Dorian will be felt across Alabama. The system will remain too far east.”
Being called on that lie five years ago didn’t stop Trump this time when Helene hit the Southeast.
“The GREAT people of North Carolina are being stood up by” Vice President Kamala “Harris and Biden, who are giving almost all of the FEMA money to Illegal Migrants,” Trump wrote in one rant on his twitter-like Truth Social. Ironically, Fortune reports Milton’s track over central Florida could clobber Sarasota, where Truth Social is headquartered.
Georgia’s Greene is another loose tongue.
Greene targeted FEMA over Milton, even as her state’s governor, Republican Brian Kemp, has been on the phone with Biden about the storm and flatly rejected a Trump accusation the two hadn’t spoken. And Biden singled out right-wing Gov. Ron DeSantis, R-Fla., by name, for praise, and for cooperation.
“They” are manipulating hurricanes to hit Republican areas, says Greene, without specifying who “they” are. Greene’s prior infamous “they” were Jews manipulating space lasers.
“Yes they can control the weather,” Greene wrote on Twitter on October 3 about the hurricanes. “It’s ridiculous for anyone to lie and say it can’t be done.”
Many conspiracy theorists scream that Jews, specifically the Rothschild family, can manipulate world events, including climate and weather events. She stuck to “they,” this time, while other conspiracy-mongers mimicked Trump and fingered the Democrats.
“Milton looks like another man-made storm, and it looks like Trump voters are victims. Is this really what’s happening?” wrote one Twitter user. “Biden and Harris are messing with the weather! Hurricane Milton was sent to Florida just like the other hurricane to wipe Florida out!! They know those are mostly Trump supporters who live in that state, so 85% of them won’t be able to vote next month,” wrote another. Added a third: “They want to kill Trump supporters and interfere with the election.”
Former Assistant Homeland Security Secretary Juliette Kayyem told PBS Newshour that Trump’s lies really do great damage to relief efforts. They even make people so scared that relief workers have to travel in pairs, for protection.
Makes the job more difficult
“If there’s distrust, rumors, all sorts of rampant lies being spread, in particular by the former President Trump, it makes the work of government more difficult,” said Kayyem, whose department includes the Federal Emergency Management Agency, which handles disaster relief.
Indeed, the lies are so pervasive that FEMA has had to create a separate web page to debunk them.
The lies also delay “the driving of resources” to hard-hit areas that need it most, Kayyem said. The worst affected are those, such as the mountains in western North Carolina during Helene, where communications, including the Internet, are cut.
“I’ve talked to people in FEMA. The concern or the animus towards the government that’s being bred and spun up by so many right now is causing some of them to have to be deployed in pairs. So that just basically means you’re wasting resources on safety and security issues that don’t normally exist in a crisis when people generally do come together,” Kayyem elaborated.
The conspiracy spinners’ theme that the hurricanes will hit only Trump voters isn’t true, either. Georgia and North Carolina, hit by Helene, are swing states, with coastal cities such as Savannah, Ga., as a Democratic haven. So are Fort Lauderdale and Orlando, Fla., which is right in Milton’s path. Miami-Dade, Fla., has trended Republican. South Carolina is deep red—except for Charleston and Columbia.
Biden told reporters on October 8 that all the conspiracies are baloney, in so many words.
“If you’re under evacuation orders, you should evacuate now, now, now. You should have already evacuated. It’s a matter of life and death and that’s not hyperbole…It’s a matter of Life. And. Death.”
Asked, “What’s the risk of political figures sharing misinformation during this time?” Biden said at that White House session that “we can take care of ourselves,” referring to the damage their lies cause the administration.
“But it misleads people, it puts people in circumstances where they panic, where they really, really, really worry, where they’re not being taken care of,” he continued. “It is, really is, and this is going to sound like an old phrase, it’s un-American.
“It really is. People are scared to death. People really know their lives are at stake. All that they own. All that they value.”
Weather scientists also debunk the conspirators, who, however, don’t trust them.
“If meteorologists could stop hurricanes, we would stop hurricanes,” Kristen Corbosiero, a professor of atmospheric and environmental sciences at the State University of New York at Albany, told Fortune. “If we could control the weather, we would not want the kind of death and destruction that’s happened.”
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