Republican Rep. Debunks GOP Hurricane Lies in Incredible Fact-Check

Even Republicans are getting fed up with MAGA’s hurricane conspiracy theories. Representative Chuck Edwards of North Carolina is one of them.

In a press release put out on Tuesday, Edwards condemned the misinformation about Hurricane Milton and Hurricane Helene that has been circulated online by the likes of Donald Trump and Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene.

“While it’s true that FEMA’s response to Hurricane Helene has not been perfect, there are outrageous rumors that have been circulated online and need to be addressed,” wrote Edwards on X, linking his incredibly thorough fact-check.

Since Helene damaged property and claimed lives across several states, including North Carolina, right-wing misinformation around the Federal Emergency Management Agency has been flying. Some Republicans and conspiracy theorists are accusing the agency of diverting much-needed resources to migrants or concocting the whole natural disaster in order to seize land.

Edwards’s debunking document starts off with him dispelling two outrageous rumors. “Hurricane Helene was NOT geoengineered by the government to seize and access lithium deposits in Chimney Rock,” and “Nobody can control the weather.”

Beyond the truly crazy, the Republican congressman also set the record straight about FEMA’s overall response to the disaster. MAGA has tried to engineer anger over FEMA’s $750 disaster relief checks. “Think of it: We give foreign countries hundreds of billions of dollars and we’re handing North Carolina $750,” said Trump on Saturday. But as Edwards clarifies, the amount “is just the first step of a longer process to provide financial assistance to disaster survivors in need of federal support.”

As Hurricane Milton is set to make landfall Wednesday, all we know for certain is that misinformation will be as prevalent as physical damage.

The lies Donald Trump’s campaign is spewing have become so extreme that even Fox News has started calling them out.

Trump’s attorney Alina Habba appeared on Fox News Tuesday to address the White House’s comments on Trump spreading misinformation about the federal government’s hurricane relief efforts.

“Let’s talk about facts,” Habba offered, but instead, she started to criticize Kamala Harris for appearing on the Call Her Daddy podcast. Habba then spread a gruesome piece of misinformation.

“There are still people missing, there are babies floating in the water, and we’re on podcasts? That’s what the Harris team is doing,” Habba claimed.

“Where did you see that report of a baby floating in the water?” interjected host Martha McCallum.

“We have absolutely heard there are children floating,” replied Habba, clearly unprepared to provide any evidence to support her talking point.

“There’s missing bodies, dead bodies, we know that. There are dead people, up to uh, 200 …” Habba sputtered as she tried to back up her baseless claim. “This is the problem. It’s not misinformation, it’s fact.”

Earlier Tuesday, FEMA director Deanne Criswell hit back at Trump’s repeated claims that there has been no on-the-ground presence in areas hit by Hurricane Helene and inadequate recovery aid, calling the accusation “completely false.”

But that hasn’t stopped Trump, who took to Truth Social Tuesday to brand the Biden administration’s response “THE WORST RESPONSE TO A STORM OR HURRICANE DISASTER IN U.S. HISTORY.”

On Monday, Trump made such extreme claims on Fox News that host Laura Ingraham repeatedly corrected him as he discussed federal hurricane relief.

Trump tried to criticize Harris’s response to Helene but kept coming up short when it came to actual reasons to complain. When Trump tried to whine that Harris was only offering $750 to victims, Ingraham had to interject that the funds were “for immediate needs.” When Trump said that Harris should go to the areas affected, such as North Carolina, Ingraham cut in to say that “she was there today, for three hours, I believe.”

Trump’s rampant lies have gotten so bad that even Republican lawmakers have had to start fact-checking the presidential nominee for their own party. Representative Chuck Edwards published a list Tuesday titled “Debunking Helene Response Myths.”

“FEMA is NOT only providing $750 to disaster survivors to support their recovery,” the release from Edwards’s office said, debunking Trump’s complaint. The list also clarified that FEMA had not diverted funding to the border or foreign aid and that the agency was not going to run out of money.

It turns out that some of the people wearing “Auto Workers for Trump” shirts at J.D. Vance’s rally in Detroit Tuesday weren’t autoworkers at all.

The Detroit News’s Craig Mauger covered the rally and spoke to some of the more than dozen people wearing the shirts. Six of the people wearing the shirts told the newspaper that they didn’t work in the automobile industry.

It’s not a surprise, as the Trump campaign has a long history of faking support from certain groups in desperate attempts to attract more voters. This isn’t even the first instance of Trump faking support from auto industry workers, either. One year ago, the former president made a big show of reaching out to union autoworkers at a campaign event in Michigan, but it was held at a nonunion factory, and it wasn’t clear how many of the people attending were even employed in the industry.

And just like on Tuesday, one person at last year’s event holding a “Union Members for Trump” told Mauger, who also covered that event, that she wasn’t in the union. Another person holding an “Auto Workers for Trump” sign told Mauger that he wasn’t an autoworker. The United Auto Workers at the time were on strike, and Trump’s actions seemed to show that he didn’t support them.

Vance’s rally on Tuesday was held in a heavily Democratic area in the battleground state, and he attacked President Biden and Kamala Harris’s efforts to help General Motors build more electric vehicles as “table scraps.” But the presence of fake autoworkers there raises the question of whether the people who attended the rally were local.

Trump’s campaign has been mocked and criticized for using fake A.I. images to claim support from Black voters as well as Taylor Swift fans. In the latter case, it backfired and led to Swift herself endorsing Harris, right after Trump’s first (and possibly only) debate with Harris. Will Tuesday’s attempt to inflate Trump and Vance’s support among autoworkers help them win the state of Michigan next month? Some of the latest polls have them trailing Harris in the state.

Donald Trump and JD Vance are busy making more enemies: this time, fans of famous baby pygmy hippo Moo Deng.

Moo Deng, the adorable viral star who lives at Khao Kheow Open Zoo in Thailand, is a pygmy hippopotamus, a protected species. Hippos like her are still targets of hunters, and this week, it was revealed that a big-game trophy hunting group endorsed Donald Trump.

According to a deep dive by Meidas News, the Safari Club International, or SCI, which has demonstrated ties to Trump and Vance, has a record book that proves that its members have hunted Moo Deng’s species. “[The pygmy hippo] is a very wary, alert animal that has proven extremely difficult to hunt by normal methods,” SCI’s record book reads. The group of hunters has more than 40,000 members and 180 local chapters.

After the Trump endorsement news, Meidas News again reported the GOP’s second controversial Moo Deng story.

In a recent podcast with SCI, Vance defended trophy hunters who target endangered and threatened species, arguing that they care about animals “more than people who never spend any real time in the environment,” and discussed the Republican culture war on gray wolves. But Vance’s ties go even deeper: The group also organized a fishing trip with Vance before the podcast recording.

Trump visited the SCI HQ in June, where he met with the “Hunters’ Embassy to discuss our shared fight to protect and promote the right to hunt,” according to SCI.

The group is encouraging and organizing their group of hunters to vote in November. Perhaps Moo Deng’s fans can do the same.

The White House under sexual abuser Donald Trump secretly worked to suppress an FBI investigation into Brett Kavanaugh while his Supreme Court nomination was under consideration by the Senate.

In September 2018, when Kavanaugh was accused of sexual assault, Trump promised that the FBI would have “free rein” to fully investigate the claims, adding that the bureau was “talking to everybody.”

“I want them to interview whoever they deem appropriate, at their discretion,” Trump posted on Twitter at the time. However, The Washington Post reported Tuesday that Trump’s assertions were all a farce, citing a new report by Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, a Democrat on the Senate Judiciary Committee.

Whitehouse’s report states that the FBI was directed to conduct a limited investigation in only a week, and requested “additional guidance” from the White House. But Trump administration officials never provided any authorization for a deeper probe into the allegations against Kavanaugh.

Messages to the FBI’s tip line about Kavanaugh were sent to the White House but weren’t investigated, and the FBI wasn’t provided written instructions for the background investigation ordered by the Trump administration, according to the report. The bureau was told by the White House to interview 10 potential witnesses, yet wasn’t given the ability to pursue any corroborating evidence, which some senators cited in their votes to confirm Kavnaugh to the Supreme Court. The FBI didn’t even speak directly to either Kavanaugh or Christine Blasey Ford, who testified before the Senate that Kavanaugh assaulted her in high school over 30 years before.

“The congressional report published today confirms what we long suspected: The FBI supplemental investigation of then-nominee Brett M. Kavanaugh was, in fact, a sham effort directed by the Trump White House to silence brave victims and other witnesses who came forward and to hide the truth,” said Debra Katz and Lisa Banks, lawyers for Ford.

Another woman, Deborah Ramirez, alleged in a New Yorker story at the time that Kavanaugh shoved his penis into her face when the two were Yale University students in the early 1980s.

“It’s really disappointing since our client was so candid about something that was a pretty awful experience,” said John Clune, an attorney representing Ramirez.

Trump today brags about his appointments to the Supreme Court and how they overturned Roe v. Wade, severely restricting abortion rights in many states around the country. And it seems that, even as he publicly claimed to be listening to allegations that Kavanaugh had a history of sexual assault, his staff were ignoring them to make their own rapist boss happy.