Trump Bashes FEMA, Vows to ‘Take Over’ Hurricane Helene Recovery During Visit to Asheville, NC
President Donald Trump trashed the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) after landing in North Carolina while vowing to “take over” Hurricane Helene recovery.
Back in September, Hurricane Helene decimated western North Carolina resulting in 219 fatalities and nearly $80 billion in damages. As a candidate, Trump publicly criticized FEMA for not doing more to help victims of the storm in the region.
On Friday morning, Trump departed the White House with First Lady Melania Trump to visit North Carolina to oversee Helene recovery and California amid the raging fires across northern Los Angeles.
Trump promised reporters that he would “take over” Helene recovery after claiming FEMA “let down the country” under former President Joe Biden.
I’m stopping in North Carolina first because they’ve been abused by what’s happened. I mean, it’s terrible. It should have been done. It should have been — a lot of things should have happened that didn’t happen. So we’re here. We’re going to fix it. We’re working with the gentlemen behind me and you know who they are and we’re going to fix it and we’re going to fix it as fast as you can. It’s a massive amount of damage.
FEMA really let us down, let the country down. And I don’t know if that’s Biden’s fault or whose fault it is, but we’re going to take over and we’re going to do a good job. We’re going to assign Mr. Whatley, who’s fantastic, frankly, and the governor and everybody else that’s going to work. We’re going to supply the money to — supply a lot of the money, maybe you have to chip in something, you chip in a little something like maybe 25% or whatever. But we’re going to get it done as quickly as we can. And we want to take care of the people of North Carolina.
It’s so interesting. Everybody’s talking about California and that’s a mess. But I said, I’m not going to California until I stop in North Carolina. So here we are. We’re going to go visit the site and we’re going to work with probably three of the congressmen, Republican congressmen, who’ve been fantastic, whose areas have been affected. And with Michael Whatley, the governor and whoever else is, you know, we decide to get involved, probably less FEMA because it just hasn’t done the job.
And we’re looking at the whole concept of FEMA. I like, frankly, the concept when North Carolina gets it, the governor takes care of it. When Florida gets hit, the governor takes care of it. Meaning if the state takes care of it, you have a group of people come in from an area that don’t even know where they’re going in order to solve immediately a problem is something that never worked for me, but this is probably one of the best examples of it not working and there’s been some others like it in Louisiana, etc. So we’re going to be doing something on FEMA that I think most people agree. I’d like to see the states take care of disasters, let the state take care of the tornadoes and the hurricanes and all of the other things that happen. And I think you’re going to find it a lot less expensive. You’ll do it for less than half and you’re going to get a lot quicker response. So that seems to be the recommendation, but we’ll be making that recommendation over the next couple of weeks. We’re going to go to the site now and we’re going to figure out a plan for really demolition and cleaning because not a lot’s been done. And we’re very disappointed in the Biden administration, but we’re going to make up for lost time.
Watch the clip above via Fox News.
