The following is a lightly-edited transcript of the October 1, 2024 episode of The Daily Blast podcast. To listen to it, click here.
This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR Network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.
Greg Sargent: Right now, western North Carolina is in the midst of a full-blown catastrophe. Due to extreme damage unleashed by Hurricane Helene, towns have been destroyed, roads have been washed out, people are frantically trying to locate friends and relatives, and there have been dozens of deaths. Enter Donald Trump. In a pair of truly ghoulish messages on social media, Trump declared that the federal government and North Carolina’s Democratic governor, Roy Cooper, are deliberately neglecting MAGA parts of the state. Trump said President Biden and Vice President Harris are deliberately letting Americans drown in the state and elsewhere in the South. Today, we’re talking to North Carolina’s Democratic Party chair, Anderson Clayton, about the horrors that the state is going through and about Trump’s reaction to it. Thanks so much for taking the time to talk to us, Anderson.
Anderson Clayton: Thank you for uplifting an important part of our state right now that needs it, Greg.
Sargent: Anderson, the stories coming out of the western part of the state are just heartbreaking. Can you bring us up to date on what’s going on?
Clayton: As folks know, almost 35 counties across western North Carolina are under a federal advisement right now for emergency services after Hurricane Helene came through and ultimately destroyed huge parts of the western part of the state. Asheville and Barnardsville and places like that being the closest impacted, places like Spruce Pine and Mitchell County right now that are still going to be impacted. Folks who are needing help or would like to know more or are being impacted by it can go to readync.gov and be able to find out more information on the ground about how you can access shelters, traffic. Right now they’ve closed off I-40 when you hit Statesville, which is in Iredell County in North Carolina, telling people not to travel to the western part of the state because the terrain out there is not traversable yet, and we want to make sure that emergency personnel are the folks that are getting to have the priority of the roadways right now throughout the western part.
Sargent: It’s looking like the rescue of residents is being complicated by cell phone services being down, rescue vehicles are having trouble getting through, gas supplies are running low, and people are having to make these really hard choices about whether to try to move with the gas they have. I think Asheville’s mayor described this as “historic devastation.” The pictures we’re seeing of Asheville underwater, whole towns destroyed. It’s just a horror. What can we all do? Listeners and anyone else, what can we all do right now to make a difference?
Clayton: Governor Roy Cooper has opened up a way that you can donate directly to Hurricane Relief. So folks can go to nc.gov/donate, and we’ll make sure we’ve got it on the state party website, too, for the North Carolina Dems. The website’s been published on the governor’s website front page just to make sure that people know where they can support if you are out of state. Supplies is the biggest thing right now. We’re hearing out of Asheville the need for water. We know that water treatment plants were flooded from this crisis, so they’re having to either rebuild treatment plants or wait for the water to go down in them to be able to actually fix whatever may be wrong with them right now. So we’re expecting water delays for at least and up to two weeks in Asheville and surrounding counties. But it wasn’t just places like Buncombe County that got hit, which is one of the hardest things to note. To your point, cell phone access has been down across that entire region. Places like Polk and Henderson counties still have not heard from some folks out there yet that have been lacking that access.
We know that it is a true tragedy for just the infrastructure that we’re seeing lost. This changed the entire geography of western North Carolina. Roadways entirely were wiped out. We have bridges going to homes that are up in the hollers in the mountains that are not able to be accessible right now. So we definitely still see this as a full search and rescue in North Carolina and trying to make sure that we’re getting out to people that may be in the more rural and remote and isolated locations in western North Carolina. It’s going to take time. We are really grateful though; the National Guard and over 11 states have sent in folks to help us out. We know that Governor Cooper is on the ground today in Asheville. He waited until the roads were safe to travel to be honest and to make sure that he was not going at a time that would be inconvenient for emergency personnel out there, which we thought was definitely important. He’s going to make sure that our FEMA director is staying out there with him until the situation stabilizes more and that we’ve rescued everyone that we need to.
I’ve gotten calls from folks all over the country right now: if you’re missing somebody in western North Carolina or have not heard from them, you can call 211, and please fill out the missing persons with their location and their full description. Make sure that you do a wellness check on somebody if you heard from them two days ago, but you haven’t heard from them since, and that you also dial that number 211 in the state.
Sargent: As far as I can tell: Republicans and Democrats pulling together at a time of disaster, not attacking each other, with one exception. Donald Trump. He enters the picture. Now look, I get that people are not going to want to think about Trump at a time like this, but Trump is running for president, and what he’s just done is a reminder of what kind of president he has been and would be again. He figured out a way to pretend that MAGA parts of the state are being neglected deliberately. He claimed that a photo on social media showing Vice President Harris working the phones on the disaster had been staged. What’s your response to all this?
Clayton: No one right now should be stoking division at a time where we still have missing people in a state like this. To your point, we have seen Republicans working together, local elected state legislative leaders, and Democrats and Republicans that have been making sure that resources get up to the western part of the state, doing supply drives together. What you see on the ground is a lot different than what you see represented in the Republican Party nationally right now for just how communities are rallying.
Roy Cooper as a governor does not care whether you’re a Republican or a Democrat right now. He cares that you’re a North Carolinian and that you’re struggling or that you need help or that someone in your family is still missing and you don’t know where they are. We have definitely had folks that we know are still out there that may have walked or had to leave their cars because of flooding. There was someone that we heard the other day, his son had walked almost 11 miles to get home. He had no idea where he was or if he was all right, but he had gotten there through the woods. Just making sure that we’re taking care of people, and Donald Trump doesn’t seem to have any interest in doing that or making sure that people in North Carolina are OK.
Sargent: He’s just doing something altogether different from what most Republicans are doing. Republicans are calling for everyone to pull together. Republicans are not saying what Trump is saying. Trump claimed Governor Brian Kemp of Georgia, which is also getting hammered, had trouble getting President Biden on the phone. But Kemp then said he got Biden quickly and Biden offered Kemp whatever he needs. I think Kemp said he appreciated that. Virginia Governor Glenn Youngkin, a Republican, also praised the federal response. It’s Trump and MAGA influencers who are using this disaster to inflame their people. Republicans aren’t doing this. Democrats aren’t doing this. What are you personally hearing from other Republicans on the ground? What’s the chatter?
Clayton: I’ll be honest, today I was talking with the Iredell Dems chair, Beth Kendall. Anybody that’s interested, if you’re in Statesville right now or any of the surrounding areas…Like I said earlier, I-40 is closed getting out to the western part of the state through Statesville, but our Democratic headquarters out there is still doing supply drives and actually making sure that we’ve got tractor trailers that are busing supplies up to Watauga County and counties surrounding like Polk County as well in that region. I was on the phone with Beth Kendall talking about what we could do to coordinate more resources, and she had someone, a Moms for Liberty voter, that came in and she said, I wish that our side was doing this and had their headquarters open. It doesn’t have to be something that’s polarizing to folks.
Sargent: It doesn’t, but that’s what Trump does. I think we need to talk a little bit about what this says about a second Trump term, what it would be like. He was president during a global disaster, Covid. His incompetence and derangement caused untold numbers of needless deaths. But additionally, he used Covid as a chance to divide people. He said nasty and vicious things about blue states and their need for federal help and so forth. We don’t need to recap all that here. But when Trump falsely claims Biden and Harris are doing the thing he actually did do, it’s not only a grotesque lie, it’s also a reminder that this is how he sees the world, including at times of disaster. Shouldn’t people take that under advisement right now?
Clayton: I think that folks have to look at the fact that something like Project 2025 that’s been endorsed by Donald Trump wants to disband something like the National Weather Service that actually targeted where this hurricane would hit landfall right within 25 miles of where it actually did. Something like that has been a huge resource federally. You look at FEMA right now, that’s coming into North Carolina heavily too. That’s going to be here throughout the next couple of months as people get their bearings about them and also make their cases about why they need help and relief, which because President Biden has declared and given us federal emergency, we are able to access FEMA powers right now too. It is important for folks to understand that these natural devastations do mean that we need government’s assistance and help and we don’t want to delegitimize what government help is doing for people across western North Carolina and what it will do to help rebuild it in the next coming years.
Sargent: What you’re saying is so important because their project is to try and seduce people into thinking that there’s no such thing as government being neutral in situations like this. What’s deadly to someone like Trump and MAGA and Project 2025 is that people could actually realize that government is being fair to everyone and trying to help everyone regardless of party. They can’t have that. They can’t allow for people to think that.
Clayton: Well, and it’s not like every government employee either is a Democrat that’s hired right now. There’s a lot of federal employees that are Republicans that have been in their jobs for a long time. Genuinely, the people that are with the Department of Health and Human Services, our emergency management services in North Carolina. You’ve got national guardsmen out there. It doesn’t matter what political party you are. It just matters that you’re a person that needs help. And that is how everyone is trying to treat this right now, at least within the state of North Carolina. It does not matter what your party affiliation is, it matters the fact that we want to make sure that people are going to nc.gov/donate, and that if people are needing to find someone in the state that they’re dialing 211. That’s what we’re trying to do right now.
Sargent: Another thing we need to think about is that this could have a big impact on the election. With the polls of dead heat in North Carolina, a few thousand votes here and there changes the outcome. Western North Carolina, which is facing severe devastation right now, is mostly red, and Trump has to run up big numbers there. But some parts are blue. Broadly speaking, red or blue, do you expect voters to leave the state and what are the challenges that you anticipate in terms of getting people to vote again, whether they’re Republican or Democrat?
Clayton: To be honest, we are still again in search and rescue mode in North Carolina. I think that we are having to do strong assessments of what polling locations and what voting will look like afterwards. We know that right now the devastation is hitting hard and that is what our main priority is focused on: making sure that people are OK. I know that there are resources that are trying to be put into backup plans, but there’s also some counties that, like I said, still don’t have cell phone service, still have access to the internet.
We don’t know how some polling locations right now are even, if they’re going to be operable. It is a large way back, but we do know we’ve got a great voter protection team at the state party that is going to lean in and help as much as humanly possible. We have a lot of really, really good election officials across the state that we know we’re going to try to make sure that every single vote is counted and matters this year. But our first priority is just making sure that people are safe.
Sargent: I want to remind everybody that we had an election during another national disaster in 2020 and elections officials performed heroically. These are nonpartisan. They’re devoted to running the election well for both Republicans and Democrats alike. I do want to ask you this though. Republicans in the North Carolina legislature changed the law to require mail-in ballots to arrive by 7:30 p.m. on election day rather than within three days after election day. Republicans overrode Governor Cooper’s veto. Right now you could have a lot of displaced people in North Carolina. Is it possible that this change in the law could become a bigger issue and what will happen? How will people deal with that?
Clayton: We already knew that law was going to disenfranchise voters anyway, dealing with how slow the postal service just is right now, thanks to Donald Trump and his taking over of the postal service in that regard during his first term. There is a huge impact right now on that. We also saw the state, the Republican Court of Appeals in North Carolina delay mail-in ballots in order to get RFK Jr.’s name off the ballot, and the Republican Supreme Court that also held up and backed up the Court of Appeals. There is a lot of postal zip codes that the postal service, or the postal offices, that are there that are not able to actually still take or receive mail. And so there’s going to be a problem making sure that we’re reaching folks like that too. Like I said, we’re still in an assessment phase. I am definitely leaving that up to the State Board of Elections and to our county boards. We are here and we’re going to be able to help figure that out, but we are still in a phase of trying to figure out what this looks like on the ground and the immediacy of it. Again, folks can go to readync.gov if you are in need of help or you would like to see resources in the state for hurricane relief right now. So far we’re going to be monitoring what voter protection efforts look like across the state henceforth.
Sargent: So let’s go back to close out to what people are enduring right now in western North Carolina. Where are you from in the state? Do you have friends, relatives, loved ones that you’re in communication with? What are you hearing from there?
Clayton: Right now, folks are just trying to make sure everybody is OK. I’m really lucky. My aunt lives in Madison County in Mars Hill and that got hit pretty hard, but she’s OK. I’ve heard from our folks in Morganton and we’ve also heard from a lot of our county party chairs. Some of their homes look flooded, but we’re lucky that they are OK. Some of our county party headquarters are also going to open up as places where folks can come get supplies, especially when the roadways open back up. Make no mistake, we’re in this for the long haul, and the North Carolina Democratic Party is going to be dedicated, especially in those counties that got impacted and hit the hardest. We’re going to do everything we can to help over the next month, two months, two years, because we know it’s going to take a long time to rebuild in communities. That’s what western North Carolina does though. That’s what Appalachia does. They’re resilient. They’re good people, and they deserve all the attention and time that we can give them.
Sargent: The rebuilding is just going to be such an epic challenge. It’s really almost unthinkable to see those pictures of whole towns washed out. Tell us one more time what listeners can do to be helpful here.
Clayton: If you’re a listener and you’ve got money to give and to donate to hurricane relief, you can go to nc.gov/donate. If you are someone or you know someone in the state of North Carolina that needs resources and needs help right now, you can go to readync.gov. And if you are someone that needs to file a missing persons report or needs a wellness check on anyone that you love or know someone that does in the state, you can dial 211 in North Carolina.
Sargent: Folks, please help out if you can. Anderson Clayton, thanks so much for coming on with us today and good luck to you all, really.
Clayton: Thanks, Greg.
Sargent: Folks, make sure to check out some new content we have up at tnr.com: Kate Aronoff arguing that Hurricane Helene shows that there are no havens from climate change, and Michael Tomasky looking at yet another example of the mainstream media burying a big Trump outrage. And over on the DSR network, check out the latest episode of Above Average Intelligence featuring the justice and intelligence correspondent for NBC News, Ken Dilanian, to talk national security, election interference, and more. We’ll see you all tomorrow.