PERRY, Fla. — President Joe Biden spent Thursday touring the damage caused by Hurricane Helene in Florida and Georgia, urging the country to “put politics aside” during his second consecutive day visiting impacted areas a week after the storm left much of the Southeast reeling.
Biden took a helicopter tour over Perry, where Helene made landfall last Thursday, and joined Sen. Rick Scott (R-Fla.) to visit a hard-hit neighborhood in Keaton Beach. Later, he flew to Valdosta, Ga., where former president Donald Trump met with residents on Monday, and visited a nearby pecan farm that had been damaged.
“Our job is to help as many people as we can, as many as we can,” Biden said during a speech in Ray City, Ga., his final stop of a day spent seeing some of the storm’s destruction. “When you do that, I hope we begin to break down this rabid partisanship that exists. I mean that sincerely. There’s no rationale for it.”
Biden’s back-to-back visits to four states — he traveled to South Carolina and North Carolina on Wednesday — were part of an effort to get a firsthand look at the damage from one of the deadliest storms in U.S. history. Biden was also seeking to demonstrate his level of concern and empathy at a time when some Republicans have blasted the federal government’s response as delayed and lacking. After initially staying away and saying he did not want to distract from the recovery effort, Biden has devoted much of his attention to being on the ground in struggling communities.
While Biden did not mention Trump as he put forward a message of bipartisanship, his speech offered implicit criticism of the former president for engaging in politics in the aftermath of a natural disaster.
Shortly before his speech, Biden pointed his social media followers to a Politico E&E News article that quoted two former Trump administration officials saying the former president had refused to approve emergency aid for California amid 2018 wildfires because the state is heavily Democratic. The story, quoting a onetime Trump aide, said the former president relented when he was shown voting data that Orange County, Calif., had more Trump supporters than all of Iowa.
“You can’t only help those in need if they voted for you,” Biden wrote Thursday on X, posting a link to the article. “It’s the most basic part of being president, and this guy knows nothing about it.”
Trump’s aides have denied that the former president played politics with disaster recovery.
“None of this is true and is nothing more than a fabricated story from someone’s demented imagination,” said Steven Cheung, a spokesman for Trump’s campaign, in response to the article.
Biden’s visit to northern Florida and southern Georgia took him to communities where voters largely have supported Republicans in recent years. In the counties the president toured Thursday, voters backed Trump over Biden by margins of more than 50 points in 2020.
“In moments like this, it’s time to put politics aside,” Biden said in Ray City, where he stood in front of a fallen tree at Shiloh Pecan Farm. “It’s not one state versus another — it’s the United States.”
Biden added that more money from his major pieces of legislation has been spent in Republican-leaning states than in states that typically vote for Democrats. He also suggested that Congress would need to move quickly to pass supplemental funding, rejecting a suggestion from House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) that such legislation could wait until after the election.
Govs. Ron DeSantis of Florida and Brian Kemp of Georgia, both Republicans, did not join the president for his visits to their states, and each offered some criticism for the Biden administration’s handling of the situation.
For his part, Trump on Thursday blasted the government’s reaction to Helene, calling it “the worst response in the history of hurricanes” and comparing it to the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. While there has been some criticism of the federal response, many local Republicans in impacted areas have praised the Federal Emergency Management Agency and other agencies for their actions in recent days.
The president’s visits came as the White House is handling multiple challenges, including a longshoremen’s strike that threatens to clog supply chains and an escalating war in the Middle East — with just over a month left to go before the presidential election.
Asked Thursday if he would support a strike against Iran’s oil facilities by Israel, Biden said “We’re discussing that. I think that would be a little … anyway.”
While the president’s remarks were unclear, oil prices jumped Thursday as tensions over the situation in the Middle East have remained high.
While visiting Florida, Biden did not respond to questions about the global unrest, instead focusing on a crisis closer to home. He participated in a briefing with officials from FEMA in Florida, and listened as Scott pointed out areas on a map showing Helene’s damage in the state. He also saw busted pipes, broken bricks and shards of glass near the beach and met with families who lost their homes.
“This can all be rebuilt,” one man told Biden after meeting him.
Kemp has thanked the Biden administration for its handling of the storm — undercutting Trump’s claims that the president had been unresponsive — but on Thursday suggested that more needed to be done.
“Earlier today, I spoke to @POTUS and thanked him for visiting our state and for adding counties to the disaster declaration list,” he wrote Thursday on X. “I also pushed for more counties to be added and for additional support as we work day and night to recover from the devastating impacts of Helene.”
Kemp told a local news outlet that he was “outraged” that some rural areas in the state had not been covered by Biden’s disaster declaration. The Trump campaign announced Thursday that Kemp will join Trump on Friday for a briefing and news conference focused on the storm. Biden said Thursday that he expected that ultimately “every county in the state will be approved.”
DeSantis, who held a news conference in another part of his state during Biden’s visit, criticized the administration for the longshoremen’s strike, saying it was “unacceptable” that delays at the ports could hamper hurricane recovery efforts.
“It really is incumbent upon the Biden-Harris administration to do everything in their power to ensure that these goods are where they need to be,” he said.
The White House has sought to showcase how robust the government’s hurricane response has been, with new announcements each day of additional support in the form of troops, meals, generators and cash assistance.
On Wednesday, the Biden administration announced that the federal government would be covering 100 percent of the cost for things like debris removal and emergency meals in Florida and Georgia.
The announcements have come as both Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris visited struggling communities and pledged that the federal government would sustain its recovery efforts in the days, weeks and months ahead.
“My final point to the residents of this community and this region is we are here for the long haul,” Harris said Wednesday in Augusta, Ga. “But there’s a lot more work that will need to happen over the long run.”
Like Biden, Harris planned to spend Thursday in Republican-friendly territory, holding a campaign rally in Ripon, Wis., the small city known as the birthplace of the Republican Party. The event, which features former congresswoman Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.), marks Harris’s return to traditional campaigning after cutting short some of her activity on Monday to respond to the hurricane.
Helene made landfall last week and carved a deadly path of destruction through six states, killing more than 210 people. Many of the deaths in Florida took place in Pinellas County, far from the places that Biden visited on Thursday.
But the hard-hit Gulf Coast communities where the storm first came ashore have been devastated by previous extreme weather events. Helene’s wreckage followed several other hurricanes that have slammed into this part of the state in recent years, and some residents who had just recovered from last year’s storms found themselves battered again.
Buck Paulk, property manager of the pecan farm that Biden visited, said he was disheartened by the amount of damage caused but hopeful that the government would be there for the recovery.
“It’s a difficult situation. You know, it’s been a struggle, a mighty struggle,” he said. “It’s disheartening, it’s expensive. But you come down and you realize, you’ve got to have help.”