With hurricanes comes a deluge of disinformation from Trump and supporters

Source: Le Monde

By Piotr Smolar (Washington (United States) correspondent)
Published today at 11:36 am (Paris), updated at 11:40 am

Just 12 days after Helene, Hurricane Milton is expected to make landfall in Florida, in Tampa Bay on Wednesday, October 9. Time is running out to clear debris before the arrival of the strongest storm to hit the state in a century, according to experts. While local and federal authorities are scrambling, Republicans are not standing idly by. Donald Trump has turned these repeated hurricanes into a subject of controversy. The former president and his allies have organized an online campaign of lies and disinformation never before seen on such a subject, with electoral objectives. The aim is to blame Joe Biden's administration, accusing it of inaction. In key states such as Georgia and North Carolina, every opportunity matters, 28 days before the election on November 5.

Faced with a crisis affecting several states, Biden decided on Tuesday to cancel his upcoming trips to Germany and Angola. At a meeting with his advisers, in front of a few journalists, the president called for an emergency evacuation of the population. He also accused those spreading disinformation of trying to undermine the administration. According to Biden, the campaign "misleads" the population, causing panic. "It's un-American. It really is. People are scared to death. People know their lives are at stake, all that they've worked for, all that they own, all that they value." In the past, Trump has twisted the facts on natural disasters, as during the California wildfires, denying the climate crisis. But the change in scale is striking.

According to Trump, "it's the worst response since Katrina," the hurricane that devastated New Orleans in 2005 and weakened President George W. Bush. A few years later, in his memoirs entitled Decision Points, Bush wrote: "The problem was not that I made the wrong decisions. It was that I took too long to decide." In short, he said it was a simple "problem of perception, not reality." It's hard not to think of this strange distinction when faced with the current administration's sluggishness to take the political – and not the humanitarian – measure of the event.




Read more: https://www.lemonde.fr/en/international/article/2024/10/09/with-hurricane-season-comes-a-deluge-of-disinformation-from-trump-camp_6728750_4.html