Donald Trump has repeatedly pushed lies about immigrants since at least 2015, so when a hurricane devastated large swathes of the southeast last month, killing over 200 people, he predictably sought to blame the disaster on Democrats and undocumented immigrants.
At first, what CNN described as the Republican candidate’s “barrage of lies and distortions” centered on claims that President Joe Biden was denying aid to red states, refusing to even take their calls.
“He’s been calling the president, hasn’t been able to get him,” Trump said last week, referring to Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp, a Republican who soon clarified that Biden had, in fact, called him.
“He offered that if there’s other things we need, just to call him directly,” Kemp said, adding that he’s had a “great relationship” with FEMA, which has deployed nearly 7,000 personnel and provided upwards of $137 million in assistance to survivors of the destruction wrought by Hurricane Helene.
Trump, fact-checked but not dissuaded, would go on to refine his lie, pivoting from claimed “reports” that deep-red portions of the south were being denied aid to claiming no would be getting any assistance because the money was all gone — spent, as it turns out, “on housing for illegal migrants.”
“They stole the FEMA money just like they stole it from a bank,” the 78-year-old told his followers.
Here Trump was referring to a program, authorized by Congress, that does indeed provide grants to help local governments and aid agencies provide housing for people seeking asylum. As The Washington Post noted, that program is administered by FEMA but not with money for disaster relief: the Republican-led House of Representatives authorized an entirely separate pool of money.
The only reported case of money being pulled from FEMA to cover the costs of housing and detaining immigrants? It occurred in 2019, when Trump was president and his administration yanked a total of $271 million from the Department of Homeland Security, including $155 million from FEMA’s Disaster Relief Fund, to address a surge in asylum applications.
So when Rep. Elise Stefanik, R-N.Y., a member of the Republican House leadership, claimed last week on Facebook that Democrats “drained FEMA to give handouts to illegal immigrants including dangerous criminals,” she knew that she was referring to a program authorized by the Republican-led chamber in which she presides. When she added that “there isn’t enough left for the Americans left devastated by Hurricane Helene,” Stefanik — silent in 2019; present for votes authorizing the program in 2023 and 2024 — likewise knew she was lying to spread fear and sow division.
The cynical and wrong response to this deluge of stuff-we-made-up is to claim that such dishonesty is the norm, the world of politics being the refuge of scoundrels. But that’s low-info nihilism masquerading as sophistication. Trump’s GOP has embraced lying, shamelessly, to the point that the conscious lie is now a point of pride.
When Sen. JD Vance, R-Ohio, admitted that he was telling made-up slanders of Haitian immigrants, he did so without apology, boasting that he is willing to “create stories” to get at a purportedly deeper truth (immigrants: bad). As with the Republican Party’s dump-truck of falsehoods about election fraud, the fact that people believe shameless lies from cynical liars is then cited as reason to keep the discussion going: people believe things that are simply not true and now we, as public officials, must validate their concerns.
Fact-checks are just another manifestation of liberals being triggered, while a willingness to spread conspiracy theories that one doesn’t even believe shows commitment to the MAGA cause and the underlying truth that the cause is good and just. Out in the real world, though — off Facebook, away from Fox News and far removed from X — these lies have real consequences.
“I’ve never seen anything like it,” Aaron Ellenburg, sheriff of Rutherford County, North Carolina, told The New York Times, referring to claims spread by Trump ally Laura Loomer, a self-styled white nationalist who openly celebrates the killing of migrants, about FEMA supposedly taking hurricane-damaged property from Republicans and giving it to elite business interests looking to mine it for lithium. Ellenburg said he’s had to spend days debunking the misinformation, which continues to be spread by elected Republicans (Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., recently suggested that a shadowy “they” used a top-secret weather machine to create a Category 4 storm). “I’m sick and tired of this crap.”
FEMA now has a regularly updated section on its website debunking viral claims spread by Trump and associates, including the assertion that it’s now “in the process of confiscating Helene survivor property.”
Speaking Sunday on ABC’s “This Week,” FEMA Administrator Deanne Criswell described the Trump-Vance disinformation campaign as “frankly ridiculous” but also “truly dangerous.” Thousands of federal employees working to provide aid to hurricane survivors are being smeared as part of an elite plot to displace red-blooded Americans with foreigners and lithium mines.
Part of the danger is that Republicans, either actively spreading the lies or answering to a base that believes them, may be unwilling to provide aid for hurricane victims going forward. If FEMA is merely a tool for Democrats to replace white Americans with non-white immigrants, why should we give it any more money?
Dozens of GOP lawmakers voted against the last FEMA appropriations bill. Now House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., isn’t so sure he’ll hold such a vote again anytime soon, despite the Biden administration warning that the huge toll from Helene could make FEMA run out of money before hurricane season is over. Johnson, appearing on “Fox News Sunday,” said he’ll wait until after the election before considering any such request.
“The thing about these hurricanes and disasters of this magnitude is it takes a while to calculate the actual damages, and the states are going to need some time to do that,” he said.
According to Republican leaders, then, FEMA is running out of money for real, GOP-voting Americans — but we will have to wait and see if Trump wins in November before we appropriate any more. In the meantime, the party will continue to lie, with Trump again claiming Monday on his website, Truth Social, that “almost all of the FEMA money” had gone “to Illegal Migrants.”
Neither conspiracy theories nor politicians lying is a new thing in America, but it would be a mistake to conclude that nothing has changed since 2016, when one of the two major political parties was taken over by a man that who took fringe falsehoods and made them his entire platform.
As Mekela Panditharatne, senior counsel at the Brennan Center for Justice, told Business Insider: "It's not necessarily unusual for emergency situations to be breeding grounds for mis- and disinformation.” What is new, however, is the extent of it — party leaders sharing lies on platforms run by fascism-curious billionaires — and, she said, “I don't think it's a coincidence that it's so close to a very consequential national election."
