Trump Held Up CA Wildfire Relief Until Learning Victims Voted For Him
When Donald Trump was in the White House, pretending to "make America great again," he blocked aid to California after 2018 wildfires because he thought the victims hadn’t voted for him.
Politico’s E&E News got the scoop from Mark Harvey, Trump’s senior director for resilience policy on the National Security Council staff. Trump White House former Homeland Security adviser, Olivia Troye, confirmed it:
Harvey said Trump changed his mind after Harvey pulled voting results to show him that heavily damaged Orange County, California, had more Trump supporters than the entire state of Iowa.
“We went as far as looking up how many votes he got in those impacted areas … to show him these are people who voted for you,” said Harvey, who recently endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris alongside more than 100 other Republican former national security officials.
E&E News documented three other incidents in which Trump viewed disaster relief as a punishment or favor, depending on the loyalty of the recipients. Inspectors general of the Homeland Security and Housing and Urban Development departments found Trump’s FEMA delayed and mismanaged aid to Puerto Rico in the wake of Hurricane Maria.