Harris Slams DeSantis’s Cowardly Response to Her Hurricane Calls

Kamala Harris had harsh words for Governor Ron DeSantis, after the Republican dodged her calls ahead of Hurricane Milton’s landfall in Florida.

As Milton intensified Monday into a Category 5 storm over the Gulf of Mexico, DeSantis decided not to respond to offers for emergency assistance from the vice president because her calls “seemed political,” according to one of his aides.

Harris was asked later that day about DeSantis’s reported refusal to take her calls outside of Joint Base Andrews in Maryland.

“People are in desperate need of support right now,” Harris said. “And playing political games at this moment, in these crisis situations—these are the height of emergency situations—it’s utterly irresponsible, and it is selfish, and it is about political gamesmanship instead of doing the job that you took an oath to do, which is to put the people first.”

DeSantis responded to Harris’s comment during an interview on Fox News Monday night.

“For Kamala Harris to try to say that my sole focus on the people of Florida is somehow selfish, is delusional,” DeSantis said. “She has no role in this. In fact, she’s been vice president for three and a half years. I’ve dealt with a number of storms under this administration. She has never contributed anything to any of these efforts, and so what I think is selfish is her trying to blunder into this.”

DeSantis said he was already in contact with President Joe Biden and FEMA director Deanne Criswell, and noted that he’d worked well with Biden and former President Donald Trump to manage weather emergencies, but that Harris was “the first one who’s trying to politicize the storm.”

“I don’t have time for these political games,” DeSantis said.

Surely, DeSantis must be thinking of an entirely different Trump, because the Republican presidential nominee has done more than his fair share of politicizing natural disasters in the last two weeks.

In the wake of Hurricane Helene, Trump baselessly claimed that the Biden administration had failed to contact Republican officials, and had prevented aid from reaching Republican areas.

He has repeatedly claimed that there have been no federal rescue efforts in western North Carolina, where the flooding and damage is most severe. His lies have then been parroted by Republican lawmakers and conservative pundits, spreading rampant misinformation about federal and state relief efforts as part of his crusade to smear the Biden-Harris administration ahead of the election.

And this kind of dangerous partisanship isn’t new for Trump. While in office, Trump was hesitant to send aid to areas where people voted against him, such as wildfire-stricken California, according to two former White House staffers.

DeSantis has also been known to put politics before his constituents—especially when it comes to climate issues. Under DeSantis’s leadership, Florida has rejected at least $11 billion in federal funds in the past few years, arguing that the money was part of an “ideological agenda” pushed by the Biden administration. Some of these million-dollar programs were rejected because they included measures for climate resiliency.

“It’s so painful to watch as DeSantis turns people into political talking points against the Biden administration,” Florida House Democratic Leader Fentrice Driskell said in January, in response to the report that her state had lost out on billions. “He’ll do it regardless of how it hurts his constituents in Florida. And since he has no logical reason for rejecting those funds, it must be political.”

Earlier this year, DeSantis signed a bill that would eliminate “climate change” as a priority in the state’s energy policies.

During the height of the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020 and amid a shortage of working Covid tests, Donald Trump secretly sent some tests to Russian President Vladimir Putin.

The revelation comes from an upcoming book by journalist Bob Woodward, War, which is scheduled to be released October 15. Putin accepted the tests but worked to keep the gift secret out of concern for backlash against Trump. He told Trump not to reveal that he sent any tests to Moscow, according to Woodward’s book.

“I don’t want you to tell anybody because people will get mad at you, not me,” Putin reportedly told Trump.

The Russian autocrat may have had a point as, at the time, states around the country were having trouble getting supplies to fight the virus, and Trump was treating the virus as more of a public relations concern. Trump told governors in the pandemic’s early months that they would have to buy their own supplies rather than rely on the federal government, saying that the White House was not a “shipping clerk” for vital resources.

At the same time, though, the federal government was outbidding states. For example, Massachusetts’s governor at the time, Charlie Baker, told Trump his state was outbid three times by the federal government for critical supplies. Now Woodward’s reports show that not only was Trump unwilling to procure testing supplies to help state governments, he was secretly sending them to Putin for his personal use.

Putin and Trump have remained in contact even after Trump left the White House, according to Woodward. The two may have spoken as many as seven times since 2021, and in one instance earlier this year, Trump sent an aide away from his office at his Mar-a-Lago estate so he could speak on the phone privately with Putin.

Their close relationship is apparent in what Trump publicly says about Russia and its autocratic leader. The former president said at a press conference last month that Ukraine should surrender to Russia and make things “much better,” basically saying his plan should he return to the White House is to give Putin whatever he wants. To wit, he’s also said he wants to “use sanctions as little as possible” against countries like Russia, Iran, and China.

Woodward is heavily critical of Trump in the book, comparing him unfavorably to Richard Nixon, the president at the center of the Watergate scandal that was exposed five decades ago by Woodward and his Washington Post colleague Carl Bernstein.

“Trump was the most reckless and impulsive president in American history and is demonstrating the very same character as a presidential candidate in 2024,” Woodward writes.

With another hurricane rapidly approaching, Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene is taking the opportunity to boost her increasingly unhinged conspiracy theories about the weather.

In a post Monday evening, Greene wrote, “Ask your government if the weather is manipulated or controlled,” re-upping her outlandish ideas that a mysterious “they” can control the climate.

The dangerous post comes after the Georgia representative also revived her antisemitic conspiracy theory about Jewish space lasers over the past week.

As MTG doubles down on her conspiracy theories, Jewish lawmakers have been targeted over the insane dog whistle.

Perhaps Greene is trying to distract from her horrible hurricane response last week, when she was missing in action, catching a football game with Donald Trump as Hurricane Helene pummeled her state.

Rapidly intensifying storms are a result of climate change, but as Hurricane Milton picks up speed, Greene is not offering her constituents anything besides her conspiracies that “climate change is the new Covid,” meaning, to her, it’s made up and controlled by the government.

Making natural disasters a cultural war issue is incredibly dangerous. On Monday, Joe Biden’s press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre pushed back against right-wing misinformation coming from Fox News about the hurricane response. Similarly, over the weekend, North Carolina Governor Roy Cooper called for “politicians, billionaires and grifters who peddle lies during a time of crisis” to be held accountable. “Spreading false information to sow chaos hurts real people.”

It’s clear that Greene’s hurricane response is all hot air.

Nobody knows how to take advantage of a spectacle quite like Donald Trump.

On October 7, the Republican presidential nominee opted to honor the one-year anniversary of the war between Israel and Palestine by unceremoniously snapping smiling photos next to images of hostages and dancing to one of his favorite rally tracks.

During his speech, Trump suggested that the people killed in the conflict—which has so far claimed nearly 42,000 Palestinian lives as well as 1,200 Israelis, the majority of whom died during the initial Hamas attack—would be able to say they sacrificed their lives for “something very special.” He then oddly danced across the stage.

“We will have achieved the dream of some generations,” Trump said. “We are going to make this. We are going to turn this. And you can never say a total positive because all of those people that have died, but we’re going to turn this into something where they can be proud of what’s happened. They can say, ‘We sacrificed our lives for something very special.’”

Trump then walked off stage while double punching his fists into the air to “Y.M.C.A.” by the Village People—one of dozens of music groups who have sued the former president for the unauthorized use of their music.

It was, all in all, a busy day full of questionable media appearances for the former president.

Speaking earlier with New York radio show Sid & Friends, Trump claimed that “nobody’s done more for the Jewish people than I have.” And in an interview with Hugh Hewitt, Trump insisted that the state of Israel—not necessarily Jewish Americans—needed to “get smart” about supporting his candidacy while speculating about the potential “waterfront property” real estate development possibilities in Gaza.

“I think that Israel has to do one thing,” Trump said. “They have to get smart about Trump, because they don’t back me. I did more for Israel than anybody. I did more for the Jewish people than anybody. And it’s not reciprocal.”

CBS’s 60 Minutes brutally roasted Donald Trump over his baseless excuses for not appearing on the show.

The Monday episode, which included an interview with Vice President Kamala Harris, began with an explanation from host Scott Pelley about exactly why viewers wouldn’t be hearing from the Republican presidential nominee for the first time in more than 50 years.

“It’s been a tradition for more than half a century that the major party candidates for president sit down with 60 Minutes in October. In 1968 it was Richard Nixon and Hubert Humphrey. This year Vice President Kamala Harris and former president Donald Trump accepted our invitation, but unfortunately last week, Trump canceled,” Pelley said.

Pelley explained that the Trump campaign had requested that the 60 Minutes team meet the former president for a sit-down interview in Mar-a-Lago, Florida, as well as a meeting in Butler, Pennsylvania, to which they had agreed.

But on September 9, they received word from Trump spokesperson Steven Cheung that the campaign was still working on the logistics for interviewers to come to Butler. Days later, Cheung called to say the president had confirmed the plan.

“Then, a week ago, Trump backed out,” Pelley said.

“The campaign offered shifting explanations,” Pelley explained. “First it complained that we would fact-check the interview. We fact-check every story.”

“Later, Trump said he needed an apology for his interview in 2020. Trump claims correspondent Lesley Stahl said in that interview that Hunter Biden’s controversial laptop came from Russia,” Pelley said. “She never said that.”

“Trump has said his opponent doesn’t do interviews because she can’t handle them. He had previously declined another debate with Harris, so tonight may have been the largest audience for the candidates between now and Election Day.”

Pelley noted that “both campaigns understood this special would go ahead if either candidate backed out,” before transitioning into the interview.

During a rambling speech on Sunday, Trump claimed he’d ended the 2020 interview after Stahl incorrectly fact-checked him about Hunter Biden’s laptop. In reality, he had thrown a fit about how inappropriate it was to be asked “tough questions” before storming off.

“Ah, it’s terrible. So we’re waiting for an apology, they want to do it again,” Trump said Sunday.

“I’ll do it again, but they gotta apol—don’t you think I should make them apologize?”

In the latest 60 Minutes episode, Pelley demonstrates the power of a good fact-check. Trump’s words, and those of his campaign, don’t match up to reality—exposing his unwillingness to face it.

In a post on Truth Social Tuesday morning, Trump ranted about Harris’s interview. “The Interview on 60 Minutes with Comrade Kamala Harris is considered by many of those who reviewed it, the WORST Interview they have ever seen,” Trump wrote, before incoherently rambling about the negative “reviews” of the federal response to Hurricane Helene.