President Joe Biden and his team have hunkered down to oversee the federal response to Hurricane Milton after the powerful storm pummeled west-central Florida, adding a major crisis to a list of others that are defining his final months in office.
“We know that life-saving measures did make a difference. … We’ve had search and rescue teams at the ready,” Biden said Thursday, standing in front of a background that said “hurricane response” in all capital letters. “There are still very dangerous conditions in the state, and people should wait for the ‘all clear’ before going out.”
“More lives are lost in the days after the storm than during the storm itself,” he said, noting he had been in direct contact with state and local officials. Earlier in the day, the White House said he had contacted several of his Republican critics in Florida, including Gov. Ron DeSantis, Sen. Rick Scott and Rep. Anna Paulina Luna.
“The truth is we’re providing the resources to rescue, recover and rebuild,” he said, adding that “Congress should be coming back and moving on emergency needs immediately” because “it’s going to be a long haul for total recovery. It’s going to take several billion dollars.”
Team Biden had hoped, after his decision to end his bid for a second term in late July, to spend his final months on something of a legacy tour. But Ukraine’s military pressing into Russia, Israel and Hezbollah pushing the Middle East to the brink of a regional conflict and two powerful storms slamming into the southern U.S. have put the outgoing president in full crisis-manager-in-chief mode.
The change of plans and focus — and former President Donald Trump’s unique way of constantly hanging over his successor’s term — were fitting at the end of a presidency that, at times, has not gone according to Biden’s best-laid plans, analysts said.
Barbara Perry, co-chair of the Presidential Oral History Program at the University of Virginia’s Miller Center, compared Biden’s crises-laden final months in office with those of George W. Bush and Lyndon B. Johnson.
“We have been here before, and presidents have been here before,” Perry said Thursday. “That said, this has been a run of bad luck for Biden. … And, with the hurricanes, just where we are with the 24-7 news cycle and social media, presidents are expected to do more. … All presidents go into their last few months hoping to spend time thinking about their libraries and how they will be portrayed in history.”
“But in 2008 as Bush 43 was leaving office, he had the crisis of our economy going off the cliff, and possibly pushing the world economy in a 1929-like depression. Even if that was the only crisis Bush 43 had, that in and of itself would be enough to be about the equivalent of the things Biden is facing,” Perry said. “And for Johnson, it wasn’t just the Vietnam War, he had everything that had happened at home in 1968. … And, like Biden, both were burdened by severe unpopularity.”
Biden and his top aides were slated to jet off Thursday morning for a nearly weeklong jaunt through Germany and Angola, partially to check off a campaign promise he made in 2020 to visit Africa. The European part of the trip largely would have been devoted to Biden’s attendance at a Ukraine defense conference in Deutschland.
Putting the trip at least on hold — aides contend visits to both countries are still possible before he leaves office on Jan. 20 — was the latest such audible for Biden, who has shifted his schedule for other natural disasters, global conflicts and mass shootings at home.
“I just don’t think I can be out of the country at this time,” Biden told reporters on Tuesday after receiving a briefing on Hurricane Milton. “We’re going to stay focused on what’s ahead of us right now.”
Biden ran in 2020, in part, on his foreign policy expertise and relationships with other prominent world figures. Top aides had described the Germany-Angola trip as one last shot at working with foreign leaders to try safeguarding partnerships and joint defense programs against a possible return of Trump and his “America first” isolationism.
Mother Nature, however, had other plans.
Biden’s White House team put on a full-court press all week to show he was managing a robust effort to prepare Florida for the coming superstorm, which ripped most of the roof from Tropicana Field, home of Major League Baseball’s Tampa Bay Rays. All week, the White House fired off blast emails with fact sheets listing hundreds of personnel and pieces of equipment that had been sent to the Sunshine State. They made sure reporters knew of meetings and briefings involving Biden, including ones in the White House Situation Room.
“I’d say that for someone in a lame duck phase of his presidency, Biden has had to confront a slew of issues and controversies, which to me only exemplifies that there is no ‘normal’ day in the life of a U.S. president,” Michael Bitzer, a political science professor at Catawba College in North Carolina, said in an email Thursday. “And it will likely continue until he hands over the reins of power to his successor on Jan. 20.”
“From the Middle East to hurricanes battering the American South and everything else going on during the hyper-polarized and partisan election cycle, the challenges that Biden is facing on a daily, if not hourly, basis demonstrates what John Dickerson entitled in his book, ‘The Hardest Job in the World’ about the American presidency,” he added, referring to the CBS News correspondent.
‘A ridiculous thing to say’
The president repeatedly this week urged those in the storm’s path to evacuate as the hurricane, at times, reached Category 5 status. Hours before Milton bum-rushed ashore, he warned it might be “the storm of the century.”
Biden should have been mostly behind closed doors on Wednesday, being briefed on the Russia-Ukraine war, Kyiv’s defense needs and how he could use one-on-one meetings called “pull-asides” at the Ukraine conference to reassure key allies as Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris remain locked in what polls suggest could be one of the closest U.S. presidential election outcomes in the country’s history.
Instead, he was forced to participate in a virtual hurricane briefing during which he had to warn Trump to stop spreading disinformation about federal hurricane relief and preparedness efforts, which the former president and surrogates have been spreading since the days after Hurricane Helene late last month caused devastation in several Southern states.
Biden also was forced to urge storm victims to ignore Trump’s latest antics.
On Wednesday, he slammed what he dubbed “outright lies” and disinformation about federal hurricane relief and preparation efforts, calling such statements “reckless” and “irresponsible.” He called Trump’s contention that Federal Emergency Management Agency dollars for hurricane efforts had been diverted to housing for illegal migrants “a ridiculous thing to say,” adding, “It’s not true.”
Bitzer said such false statements have been a “layer on top of everything else” for Biden and his team.
“From domestic to international issues to the rise of misinformation and active disinformation, I’m sure the president and the administration are feeling like they play whack-a-mole in their final days,” he said. “But they must keep operating as if they just took office and fully invest themselves and their energies into addressing the myriad of issues.”
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