The White House didn’t need a fresh round of allegations about Donald Trump politicizing federal disaster aid, but it’s confronting striking new claims anyway. Politico reported:
President Donald Trump overruled his own agencies when he denied disaster aid for four Democratic-led states this month.
Emails between state and federal officials obtained by POLITICO along with more than 150 pages of documents submitted to FEMA by three states — New Jersey, Massachusetts and Rhode Island — provide new details about Trump’s low rate of approving disaster aid for his political adversaries. He also denied a request by New York after administration officials verified that it had met federal standards for approval, according to state officials.
According to the Politico report, which hasn’t been independently verified by MS NOW, officials working in regional offices of the Federal Emergency Management Agency and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration agreed that the states met the necessary thresholds for receiving federal relief, but the president ignored their findings and rejected the aid anyway — a move that apparently has no modern precedent.
To hear Team Trump tell it, there’s no real story here. The White House wouldn’t specifically answer Politico’s questions about why the blue states’ requests were rejected, but a spokesperson insisted in a statement, “There is no politicization to the president’s decisions on disaster relief,” adding that Trump handles disaster requests “with great care.”
It’d be great if that were true, though there’s a whole lot of evidence to the contrary.
Earlier this month, for example, over the course of three days, Trump rejected disaster aid requests from Democratic-led states that voted against him in recent elections, while approving relief for six Republican-led states — simultaneously touting assorted GOP politicians in those states.
In fact, the president took the extraordinary step of including explicit endorsements for Republican candidates in the respective states while announcing his decision to approve federal disaster funds. In other words, even as the White House tells the public that “there is no politicization to the president’s decisions on disaster relief,” Trump has literally connected campaign endorsements to his approvals for aid requests, a move that has no precedent in American history.
There’s also the data to consider. The Associated Press reported two weeks ago on an analysis that showed Trump denying aid to Democratic-led states in disproportionate ways, which dovetailed with a Politico report from March that pointed to the administration’s own statistics and concluded that the incumbent president “has rejected disaster aid for Democratic-run states at the highest rate in the 47-year history of the Federal Emergency Management Agency.”
What’s more, there’s no reason to limit the focus to disaster relief funds. Last week, the Trump administration acknowledged in a court filing that it scrapped federal energy grants to blue states, terminating funds “based solely” on political criteria, targeting projects in Democratic-led states where voters opposed the GOP ticket in 2024.
Team Trump has also curtailed federal healthcare funds, but only for states the White House doesn’t like. Team Trump has also tried to freeze $10 billion in funding for social services programs in five states, but only blue states were affected. Team Trump has also launched a supposed crackdown on fraud in social insurance programs, but its sole focus is on Democratic cities and states.
Taking stock of the broader dynamic, The New York Times’ Jamelle Bouie argued last fall, “Trump seems to see Democratic-led states — and the people in them — less as constituents to which he has a set of larger obligations and more as enemies to be pacified and defeated. For Trump, there is no whole people of the United States. There are only his people and his states.”
The Republican White House has had plenty of opportunities to disprove the observation. It’s gone to breathtaking lengths to do the opposite.
This post updates our related earlier coverage.
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