Elon Musk Joins Trump’s Fight With White House Over Hurricane Helene

Donald Trump is taking credit for getting Appalachians connected to Elon Musk’s Starlink before President Joe Biden, and Musk—still hoping for a job in a Trump Cabinet—is helping him with the lie.

“I just spoke to Elon. I’m getting him—we want to get Starlink hooked up because they have no communication whatsoever. And Elon will always come through. We know that,” Trump said  Monday during a visit to Georgia, while mischaracterizing the federal response to Hurricane Helene. “And so we’re working on that, getting them hooked up.”

Musk backed Trump’s claim on Tuesday morning, asserting that Trump alerted him “to additional people who need Starlink Internet in North Carolina.”

There’s just one problem with Trump taking all the credit though. According to White House spokesperson Andrew Bates, this was “already happening.”

A Monday press release from the Federal Emergency Management Agency showed that 40 Starlink satellite systems are available” in the region for emergency communications, with another 140 satellites “being shipped to assist with communications infrastructure restoration.”

Jaclyn Rothenberg, director of public affairs for FEMA, told Business Insider that Trump wasn’t involved in sending satellites to disaster areas and that the federal government made the decision on Sunday.

In Trump’s speech, it wasn’t clear if he was calling for more Starlink satellites to be deployed, but given his general lies about the federal government’s hurricane response, it’s likely he was ignoring the Biden administration’s efforts altogether. And now, Musk is helping him push the narrative that Biden is “sleeping” through the hurricane damage.

Also on Monday, Trump claimed that North Carolina Governor Roy Cooper was ignoring Republican hit areas (not true) and that Georgia Governor Brian Kemp was “having a hard time getting the president on the phone,” despite Biden having spoken with Kemp the day before.

It’s clear that Trump, and his billionaire friends, will do anything to make this natural disaster a publicity stunt.

Fox and its business affiliates have apparently shed any pretense of relying on verifiable sources of information for their on-air claims.

During Tuesday’s episode of Mornings with Maria, host Maria Bartiromo cited a news source that isn’t just controversial—it’s actually not news whatsoever.

“I want to get your take on whether you’ve got confidence there, in Arizona, because apparently The Gateway Pundit reported that the GOP chairwoman provided an update to allegations that there’s not going to be a fair election there,” Bartiromo said to RNC Co-Chair Michael Whatley, basing the information on a conspiracy site well known for publishing hoaxes.

The Gateway Pundit filed for bankruptcy in April amid several defamation suits, including one brought by a pair of 2020 Georgia election workers, mother-daughter duo Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss, who won a nearly $150 million suit against ex-Trump attorney Rudy Giuliani on similar claims.

The site is also under the gun for another lawsuit brought by Dominion Voting Systems, which accused Gateway Pundit of publishing defamatory stories about its voting machines during the last presidential election.

But if she’s still keen to rely on such a site for hard evidence, perhaps that’s the sort of company Bartiromo keeps. The Fox anchor and her insipid theories about the authenticity of the last election took center stage in the conservative media behemoth’s own defamation suit with Dominion, in which the network was accused of launching baseless attacks on the efficacy of Dominion’s voting equipment. That lawsuit amounted to Fox paying a whopping $787 million settlement in 2023, averting a high-profile trial that would have embroiled some of the nation’s highest grossing media talent and the media executives of the country’s largest media machine.

Fox News’s Laura Ingraham has started pushing a wild conspiracy theory about the federal response to Hurricane Helene that seems copy-pasted from another natural disaster.

Ingraham hosted a segment speculating Monday night about what a strong leader Donald Trump would have been during the aftermath of Hurricane Helene, and criticizing President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris for their disaster response in North Carolina.

Ingraham also reignited an old conspiracy theory when criticizing Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttegieg, who, she remarked, “loves to go on TV campaigning for Kamala every five minutes.”

“But when will he go on TV to tell us when I-40 is gonna open? Or how many bridges are going to have to be totally rebuilt?” Ingraham sneered.

“Will they drop all their DEI regulations—any that still exist—to ensure that people get the help they need as fast as possibly, as possible?” Ingraham said.

Here, Ingraham’s claim seems to come out of nowhere, and it’s unclear what “DEI regulations” she imagines would prevent the distribution of aid or the rebuilding of vital infrastructure. Of course, DEI is something of a right-wing catch-all for any perceived institutional failure.

Seconds later, Ingraham ironically noted that a “delayed show of concern by our president and vice president has bred its own conspiracy theories.”

If blaming a natural disaster response on wokeness sounds familiar, that’s because it is.

In August 2023, voices on the far-right, including then-presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy and Turning Point USA’s Charlie Kirk, tried to spread a conspiracy theory that the local response to the wildfires in Maui had been weakened by the “DEI agenda.”

This comparison seems to have been exactly what Ingraham was going for, because during the same program Monday, Ingraham was joined by former Hawaii Representative Tulsi Gabbard, who has taken a sharp rightward turn since her Democratic run for president in 2020 to become a member of Trump’s campaign team.

Ingraham and Gabbard both likened the severe flooding in North Carolina to the devastating wildfires in Maui in August of 2023, and criticized the federal response based on… what exactly?

Gabbard claimed that some of her friends in Asheville and the surrounding areas said they had been experiencing the “same thing that happened to our communities in West Maui.” She said her friends “did not see a single federal official on the ground, not even a FEMA orange-vest wearing person.” Gabbard also insisted that the federal government was “focusing on bureaucracy.”

But shaky, sourceless reporting like Gabbard’s secondhand accounts is par for the course for Fox News. In August, host Maria Bartiromo repeatedly claimed that Democrats have been pushing to register “massive lines of illegals” to vote in Texas, but she never did any actual reporting to confirm that topic.

FEMA reported Monday that it had delivered about one million liters of water and more than 600,000 meals across North Carolina, according to NBC News. Residents and local officials have criticized the government for not being adequately prepared to deal with the severity of the destruction in Asheville, which was recently dubbed a “climate haven.”

The first—and probably only—vice presidential debate between Tim Walz and J.D. Vance is taking place Tuesday evening.

It’s sure to be entertaining, given both candidates’ unique tendency to be turned into memes, whether willing or not.

This may also be the last debate at all before the November election, as Donald Trump is thus far chickening out of a second debate with Kamala Harris. That makes it an important one, especially as early voting is already underway in much of the country.

If you are watching the debate, join The New Republic in a game of Bingo. (You can also throw our key terms into a Bingo card generator if you’d like to play with friends.)

The vice presidential debate will begin at 9 p.m. EST.  The debate will air in full on CBS News and its YouTube channel. Other outlets including C-Span and PBS News will also broadcast the event.

Despite President Biden’s public comments stating the opposite, the U.S. government actually backed Israel’s attacks and bombing of Lebanon.

Citing Israeli and U.S. officials, Politico reported Monday that White House officials told Israel that the U.S. would support its decision to bomb Hezbollah targets, despite the fact that publicly, Biden was urging a cease-fire.

Specifically, presidential adviser Amos Hochstein and Brett McGurk, the White House coordinator for the Middle East, told Israeli officials that the U.S. supported Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s strategy to launch military attacks on Lebanon in order to convince Hezbollah to engage in diplomatic talks.

The U.S. government wasn’t united in this stance, however. Some officials in the State Department, the Department of Defense, and in the intelligence establishment warned Israel’s move could pull the U.S. further into another war in the Middle East. 

Israeli officials told their U.S. counterparts in mid-September of the change in military strategy, but didn’t mention any specifics. McGurk and Hochstein, while reportedly urging caution, replied that it was a good time to attack Lebanon as Hezbollah had suffered losses in previous months.

The report contradicts what the administration has said publicly. Biden was asked Monday if he was comfortable with an Israeli ground invasion of Lebanon, and replied, “I am comfortable with them stopping. We should have a cease-fire now.”

But, cease-fire talks are seemingly in limbo as Israel continues to bomb Lebanon, killing more than 700 people since September 23, including Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah on Friday. Israeli officials dropped multiple U.S.-provided 2,000-pound bombs on residential buildings in Beirut’s southern suburbs to kill Nasrallah. The U.S. government, led by Biden, appears unwilling to use its military support of Israel as leverage to stop the latest conflict, much as it refused to do in Gaza.