We’re down to the final two weeks of the presidential campaign and what was already one of the closest, most tumultuous races in U.S. history is getting even wilder.
Former President Donald Trump on Monday toured damage from Hurricane Helene in Asheville, North Carolina, and told reporters afterward that he would favor having congressional lawmakers return from their election recess to deliver more disaster relief funding for the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA). “This is a very unusual situation, and I would be in favor of it,” Trump said.
FEMA has said it has enough funding to respond to the one-two punch delivered in the southeastern United States by Hurricanes Helene and Milton. President Joe Biden has called on Congress to restore funding that ran out for a Small Business Administration disaster loan program and has warned that FEMA’s Disaster Relief Fund faces a shortfall at the end of the year. House Speaker Mike Johnson has said it is too soon for lawmakers to provide more funding, saying that states still have to fully evaluate their needs.
Trump’s visit to North Carolina followed a staged publicity event at a Pennsylvania McDonald’s on Sunday and some crude remarks about the late golf legend Arnold Palmer’s genitalia at a rally on Saturday that also veered into profanity about Vice President Kamala Harris.
After touring storm damage, the Republican presidential nominee criticized the federal response to Helene and North Carolina’s Democratic governor, Roy Cooper. He promised to slash through the bureaucracy and bring prosperity to the region if elected to another term. And he again falsely claimed that FEMA didn’t have the necessary funding because money had been diverted to migrant shelters, calling the agency’s response “a disgrace.”
“They had spent hundreds of millions of dollars doing other things, things that I don’t think bear any relationship to this money,” Trump. “They were not supposed to be spending the money on taking in illegal migrants, maybe so they could vote in the election. Because that’s — a lot of people are saying that’s why they’re doing it. I don’t know, I hope that’s not why they’re doing it.”
FEMA has separate programs and separate funding for disaster relief and sheltering migrants. White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre warned Monday that Trump’s misinformation is “dangerous.”
At a rally later in the day in Greenville, North Carolina, Trump criticized Harris, focusing much of his speech on immigration, which he said was a more important issue than the economy. He promoted a baseless conspiracy theory by suggesting that Harris and Democrats had allowed illegal immigrants to enter the country so they could vote and repeated his promise to use the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 to launch “the largest deportation program” ever. “Think of that, 1798,” he said. “That’s when we had real politicians that said we’re not going to play games. We have to go back to 1798.”
An end to federal income taxes? In a pre-taped appearance at a New York City barbershop that aired on Fox News on Monday morning, Trump was asked if there would be a way to eliminate federal taxes once the country “is back on its feet” and generating enough revenue to pay off its debt.
It was, frankly, a preposterous question based on a false premise, but Trump answered in the affirmative, again pointed to his tariff plans and harkened back to a much different time in U.S. history, repeating his glorification of the 1890s and President William McKinley, who took office in 1897.
“There is a way,” Trump said. “You know, in the old days, when we were a smart country, in the 1890s — this is when the country was relatively the richest it ever was. It had all tariffs. It didn't have an income tax.”
What the country did have back then was a deep economic depression from 1893 to 1897 and high tariffs, enacted in 1890, that were massively unpopular and led to a political drubbing for Republicans.
