Florida Republican Demands Hurricane Aid She Tried to Block

Republican Representative Anna Paulina Luna demanded more FEMA funding for Florida, just weeks after she voted against a bill that provided $20 billion for federal emergency funds.

As Hurricane Milton approaches the Florida coastline, Luna has waded into a growing spat between Vice President Kamala Harris and Florida Governor Ron DeSantis.

“We have a category 5 hurricane headed right to Pinellas, and @KamalaHarris is taking this time to attack @GovRonDeSantis?” Luna wrote Monday in a post on X.

“Cut the crap. We need FEMA DOLLARS FREE’D UP. ALL ASSETS. STOP ATTACKING RON AND DO YOUR JOB! @VP” she added.

But just last month, as Hurricane Helene approached the United States, Luna voted to shut down the federal government, vetoing a measure to extend FEMA funding by $20 billion. Luna was among 82 House Republicans who voted against the deal and one of 11 Florida lawmakers who cast dissenting votes.

Now, as Florida prepares to face a massive Category 5 storm that has prompted massive evacuations across the state, Luna is vying to get every cent she can.

When Luna failed to support FEMA funding, she faced strong criticism from Democratic candidate Whitney Fox, who is running to unseat her.

“As the worst storm in our lifetime was hours away, Luna couldn’t set aside her partisan games for even a moment,” Fox said. “She voted to delay critical FEMA aid and emergency support when we would need it most. This isn’t leadership—it’s a catastrophic failure.”

At the time, the White House warned that the stopgap bill, while necessary to pass, did not provide adequate funding to help communities recover from natural disasters.

Donald Trump’s campaign team is lashing out against a journalist following news that the former president secretly kept in touch with Russian President Vladimir Putin after leaving the Oval Office.

A statement put out by Trump’s communications director, Steven Cheung, is rife with ad hominem attacks against journalist Bob Woodward, calling him a “total sleazebag,” “an angry, little man,” “a truly demented and deranged man,” and also “a boring person with no personality.”

In his new book, War, which Trump’s campaign says “belongs in the bargain bin of the fiction section of a discount bookstore,” Woodward writes that Trump has made at least seven calls to the Russian leader since leaving office. Trump also allegedly secretly gave Putin Covid-19 testing equipment during the early days of the pandemic.

“Please don’t tell anybody you sent these to me,” Putin told Trump, according to the author, out of concern for the backlash Trump would undoubtedly face. “I don’t care,” said Trump. “Fine.”

Woodward also says that in one incident at Mar-a-Lago earlier this year, Trump told a senior aide to leave so he could have “a private phone call with Russian President Vladimir Putin.”

Accusing the investigative journalist of having “Trump Derangement Syndrome,” Trump’s team has denied his close relationship with Putin, stating that none of what Woodward writes is true, without any real rebuttal.

Following the news, Trump posted an edited clip of Robert Mueller on Truth Social, calling the investigation the “RUSSIA HOAX!”

Republicans have launched a host of lies and disinformation throughout the 2024 hurricane season. So far, conservative leaders in heavily affected regions, including Florida and Georgia, have accused the Biden administration of diverting funds from FEMA to assist undocumented immigrants entering the country (a charge that FEMA has fervently rejected), claimed that working with the White House to expedite disaster relief “seemed political,” and have conspiratorially suggested that the hurricanes are a government manipulation.

But the depth and depravity of the Donald Trump–swirled fiction stretches even further, even to the point of harming one of the MAGA leader’s strongest voting blocs.

By Tuesday, it became clear to federal officials that the lie that FEMA was out of money had stopped people from actually requesting their aid in the wake of Hurricane Helene, which devastated large swaths of North Carolina and Georgia.

Speaking with CNN, former Republican communications strategist Douglas Heye lamented how Trump’s own supporters were bearing the brunt of the misinformation.

“The area of North Carolina that was hit is overwhelmingly Republican,” Heye, a North Carolinian, told the network. “By spreading this misinformation, you’re hurting your own voters first. And we know Donald Trump takes his people sort of as a special case, he’s damaging them for his own political goods. That’s malicious.”

But the magnitude of disaster caused by the bold-faced lies will only come to light after the full hurricane season has passed. On the immediate horizon swirls another massive superstorm, Category 5 Hurricane Milton, which is scheduled to slam the west side of Florida by Wednesday evening. Central Floridian leaders have repeatedly warned Milton’s arrival at the Sunshine State’s shores will be a catastrophic event that will claim lives and demolish the region, with forecasted 10-to-15-foot storm surges that Tampa Mayor Jane Castor has described as “not survivable.”

“I can say without any dramatization whatsoever: If you choose to stay in one of those evacuation areas, you’re going to die,” Castor told CNN on Monday, a warning she said she has never issued before.

Speaking with MSNBC on Monday night, Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas said he had “not seen” weather emergency–related inaccuracies “ever before at this level.”

“You and I both remember a time when an extreme weather event, a natural disaster, actually brought people together,” Mayorkas told host and former White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki. “Now, unfortunately, tragically, quite frankly, it is politicized. And what happens is, the people who are victimized by the natural disaster are the ones who will suffer.”

“It sows distrust in their government, and therefore they don’t seek the help that they truly need,” Mayorkas continued. “We have funds to put in their pockets to be able to help them address immediate needs. These individuals are not seeking that relief because of the disinformation, the intentionally false information, they are receiving.”

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.