At least 202 people are dead across six states following Hurricane Helene, and no place was hit harder than North Carolina, where I’m from. Western North Carolina’s tumbling landscapes, remote communities, and already swollen rivers made the region especially primed for disaster, and now disaster has arrived. “This is one of the most catastrophic events that our state has ever seen,” the state’s transportation secretary said Tuesday.
And at least 40 people around Asheville, the area’s largest city, died in the storm. Residents in hard-to-reach places desperately need food and water and medical supplies. It’s a tragedy in real time.
Some lies should be left to wither and die. Others demand a response.
You would think the partisan hacks would give it a rest while people are dead, dying, or missing. But folks out here were only spared the election gimmicks for about 100 hours. On Monday, former President Donald Trump, who’s slipping behind his Democratic opponent Kamala Harris in swing states like North Carolina, began lying about the recovery efforts, at least the ones led by Democrats, falsely characterizing them as nonexistent.
“At a time like this, when a crisis hits, when our fellow citizens cry out in need … We are not talking about politics,” Trump said Monday, surveying the damage from Valdosta, Georgia.
Then he immediately made it about politics, claiming falsely that Biden was “sleeping” and couldn’t be reached by leaders in hard-hit areas, and that government officials were “going out of their way to not help people in Republican areas.” He claimed Georgia’s Republican governor, Brian Kemp, couldn’t get Biden on the phone, but that was directly contradicted by Kemp just hours before. That didn’t stopTrump and his MAGA surrogates in the Republican Party and right-wing media from repeating and amplifying those falsehoods and others.
Some lies should be left to wither and die. Others demand a response. I’m a longtime journalist in North Carolina. Here’s what’s actually happening here:
Federal aid has been coming in since Saturday, a day after the storm, when President Biden responded to Gov. Roy Cooper’s request and issued a disaster declaration, an important procedural step in hastening federal aid. Biden visited North Carolina Wednesday, and Cooper said he’d spoken with the president about using military assets at nearby Camp Lejeune and Fort Liberty to help out.
Biden’s head of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, Deanne Criswell, has been on the ground since Monday and says FEMA plans to stay as long as they’re needed. More than 57,000 people in North Carolina had requested federal aid from her agency by Tuesday, and some have already received it.
Meanwhile, on Tuesday, members of the National Guard airlifted hundreds of thousands of pounds of food and supplies to desperate communities. State transportation leaders say their crews have been working around the clock to clear damaged roads and interstates for rescue workers and utility companies. Many of these isolated mountain roads were rendered impassable by mudslides and flooding which is why the progress can be heartbreakingly slow. However, Interstate 40 was reopened around Asheville Tuesday morning.
North Carolina healthcare leaders are working to assist nursing homes, assisted living facilities, and other healthcare centers cut off from power, water, and supplies. Volunteers were mobilizing to deliver food and water. And state workers were fielding an “unprecedented” number of phone calls to a hotline designated for people who can’t reach a lost loved one.
“No matter who and where you are in western North Carolina,” Cooper said Tuesday, “if you need help, we are working around the clock to reach you.”
Like everything else about Robinson’s candidacy, the story cracks under scrutiny.
That’s just a portion of federal, state and local officials’ recovery work, which is boosted by private donors, businesses, and various nonprofits. Of course, Helene’s victims need more. They will for years. But all these efforts aren’t nothing. And they don’t square with Trump and his MAGA allies’ attempts to convince people that Helene is Biden’s Hurricane Katrina, especially because their motivations appear to be cruel politics, not humanitarian concerns.
Communication is difficult in parts of western North Carolina right now, but imagine being there and reading Trump’s lies that the cavalry isn’t coming. Mark Robinson, the Trump-approved candidate for governor of North Carolina, is taking a similar approach to distract voters from his latest scandal, this one involving inflammatory posts he allegedly made on a porn messaging board between 2008 and 2012.
When the storm hit, Robinson started posing in front of broken roads with highway patrolmen, showing up and claiming credit for a supply drive run by a local county sheriff’s office, and, on his X account, spreading misinformation about Cooper, “hob-nobing” (sic) in New York instead of preparing for the storm.
Like everything else about Robinson’s candidacy, the story cracks under scrutiny. A report from North Carolina journalists found that, as the storm approached the southeastern United States last week, Robinson, who is also the state’s lieutenant governor, was the only member of North Carolina’s Council of State that didn’t respond to Cooper’s call for emergency powers, which allowed the governor to mobilize rescue efforts.
Some people who work in politics will tell you the stagecraft is part of the job, to make your candidate look like a serious leader—whether or not it’s true. They’ll tell you that and then wonder why so many people hate politics.
But people know when a politician is there to help and when that politician is there to treat a disaster zone like a photo op. And hurting people, who’ve lost everything in the space of a few hours, like the folks out in western North Carolina, see that more clearly than most.
There’s no room for artifice when you can’t find your mom or your children, or if you can’t get oxygen for your grandmother who depends on it. To add insult to injury, there’s the staggering hypocrisy for the MAGA politicians. In 2017, after Hurricane Matthew killed dozens and left huge portions of eastern North Carolina underwater, then-President Trump denied North Carolina more than 99% of the federal relief funds that were requested. A good Southerner forgives but never forgets. Their hypocrisy doesn’t annul North Carolina’s need for help, but it’s meaningful. Rep. Virginia Foxx, a western North Carolina MAGA Republican, was also photographed helping a supply drive in the region this week, but Foxx was one of 11 Republicans who voted against providing federal aid to victims of Hurricane Katrina in 2005. Then there’s Sen. Ted Budd, who’s demanding more federal aid but has voted against FEMA aid and hurricane relief for other people on multiple occasions. So has Congressman Dan Bishop, who promised Monday to “make sure the federal government is supporting our state.” That they’re hypocrites doesn’t mean North Carolina doesn’t need the help, but it’s meaningful. They have no mercy for others but demand it for themselves. While in office, Trump also delayed aid for hurricane-hit Puerto Rico until just before the 2020 election and moved money from FEMA’s budget to shuttle more migrants back to Mexico. And Trump and his allies have repeatedly referred to climate change as a hoax and resisted efforts for any meaningful resistance to global warming, even though climate scientists tell us that we can expect more mammoth storms like Helene in the future. It’s not about liberal versus conservative ideology. There are plenty of well-meaning public servants in the Republican Party, the party of Ronald Reagan, John McCain, and Mitt Romney. It’s about real versus fake, and death and destruction has a way of making the fake stand out. These Republicans are frauds. They respond to emergencies like con artists and ambulance chasers, not like leaders. It takes courage as a political leader to stand in front of people who’ve lost everything in a disaster. You’re there to listen and to try to help them. Based on Trump’s stop in Georgia, he seems to be there to talk and be helped—in this case, by scoring political points against his Democratic rivals. In times of crisis, some politicians are there to help and some are there to stand and talk. We’ve seen enough of Donald Trump and his MAGA allies to know which kind they are.
Billy Ball, a journalist from North Carolina, has covered the South for almost two decades. He’s a senior editor at Cardinal & Pine, an online newsroom in North Carolina, and founder of The Living South, a journalism project focused on changemakers in the American South. 
