Watch: Ron DeSantis Blows a Fuse Upon Hearing Hurricane Damage Costs

Florida Governor Ron DeSantis on Thursday got angry at a reporter who asked him about a Wall Street analyst’s estimate that Hurricane Milton could cost the state over $50 billion.

“How the hell would a Wall Street analyst be able to know? It’s been dark all day. What, you just going to know that you’re gonna do? I mean, give me a break on some of this stuff,” DeSantis said.

“I’m not saying there’s not going to be damage, there will be, [Hurricane Milton] cut across the state in a way that Helene did not,” DeSantis added.

Earlier this week, the discussion on Wall Street estimated the hurricane as having a “mid-double-digit billion dollar loss.” DeSantis downplayed the storm’s impact compared to Hurricane Helene and Hurricane Ian in 2022, while noting that certain areas did suffer heavy damage.

“In terms of just right now, the morning after, if I think back to, like, Hurricane Ian, I don’t think that you’re looking at similar amount of damage to Ian, and then, with Helene, there may end up being more overall damage, there may not, I don’t know, but definitely the surge did not reach Helene levels,” DeSantis added.

Earlier this week, DeSantis refused to speak on the phone with Kamala Harris, saying such an overture “seemed political.” The vice president called out the Florida governor for engaging in “political gamesmanship instead of doing the job that you took an oath to do, which is to put the people first.”

DeSantis does seem to be keeping politics in mind in his response to the storm, staying away from outright praising the Biden administration’s help even as he boasts of being able to “leverage any resources available to us.” But it’s puzzling as to why he would get upset at a reporter for a legitimate question regarding the financial impact of the hurricane.

After spending days calling for CBS to release a full transcript of Vice President Kamala Harris’s interview on 60 Minutes, Donald Trump woke up bright and early Thursday with a new idea: leverage the public appearance as a reason to call for the Democratic presidential nominee’s concession in the race.

“A giant Fake News Scam by CBS & 60 Minutes,” Trump wrote on Truth Social. “Her REAL ANSWER WAS CRAZY, OR DUMB, so they actually REPLACED it with another answer in order to save her or, at least, make her look better.”

“A FAKE NEWS SCAM, which is totally illegal,” he continued, baselessly claiming that a network choosing to make its own edits is akin to a crime. “TAKE AWAY THE CBS LICENSE. Election Interference. She is a Moron, and the Fake News Media wants to hide that fact. An UNPRECEDENTED SCANDAL!!! The Dems got them to do this and should be forced to concede the Election? WOW!”

Attached to the post was a clip of Harris’s interview on the show compared to a teaser clip distributed by the network. The teaser clip spliced a section of another answer the vice president gave to a question related to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Between the edited and unedited version of Harris’s response to the original question, the two answers are starkly different.

But ultimately, that choice was not Harris’s.

“We do not control CBS’s production decisions and refer questions to CBS,” an unidentified aide for the Harris campaign said in a statement to Variety.

And, at minimum, at least the vice president actually engaged in the sit-down interview with the legacy network. During its Monday night broadcast, CBS News’s Scott Pelley said that Trump backed out of his own scheduled interview with 60 Minutes at the last minute—the first time a presidential candidate had rebuffed the long-standing October tradition since 1968—revealing that the Trump campaign had “complained that we would fact-check the interview.”

“We fact-check every story,” Pelley said.

Meanwhile, Trump has threatened to pull the broadcast licenses of major networks when he disagrees with their coverage of himself or his campaign. But that doesn’t mean his perspective on editing and censorship is buttoned up: Trump has enjoyed more than his share of selectively edited interviews on Fox, some of which have gone so far as to swap out his answers when discussing heavy topics such as serial sex offender and human trafficker Jeffrey Epstein.

The New York Times has taken the mainstream media’s sanewashing of Donald Trump to the next level, this time with an innocuous-sounding headline: “Trump’s Remarks on Migrants Illustrate His Obsession With Genes.”

The headline and corresponding article, published Wednesday evening, are actually obfuscating a far darker reality: Trump’s obsession with eugenics.

Speaking on conservative radio on Monday, Trump went on an incredibly racist rant about bloodlines while speaking about immigrants. “You know, now a murderer, I believe this, it’s in their genes. And we got a lot of bad genes in our country right now. They left, they had 425,000 people come into our country that shouldn’t be here, that are criminals.”

But the paper of record minimized the true horror of that comment, summarizing that Trump was “invoking his long-held fascination with genes and genetics.”

The Times received plenty of flack online for its whitewashing of the Republican nominee’s dangerous lies about immigrants and his white supremacist rhetoric.

Several paragraphs in the Times article mentioned Trump’s remark last year about immigrants “poisoning the blood of our country,” with the article’s author calling it “a phrase criticized by many for evoking the ideology of eugenics promulgated by Nazis.” The author then discussed the role of the eugenics movement in politics in the past, without acknowledging its role in the present.

As Trump vows to enforce “bloody” mass deportations in a second term, what’s the point of painting his racist “bad genes” comments as benign?

North Carolina’s Republicans apparently don’t think that hurricane victims should have more time to mail in ballots or register to vote.

Democrats in the North Carolina House of Representatives filed a bill to extend the state’s voter registration deadline by five days to October 16, and to allow absentee ballots three more days to arrive in order to make sure victims of Hurricane Helene could do their civic duty. Every single House Republican voted no on the measure on Wednesday.

Democrats made a motion to suspend the rules on the bill in the state House, but Republicans voted unanimously against the motion, stopping the bill from a final vote. According to Democratic State Representative Julie von Haefen, only one Republican, Representative Destin Hall, debated the motion, accusing Democrats of playing “partisan games.”

The state election board did grant some leeway to 13 counties affected by the storm. Voters in those counties can request mail-in ballots in person until November 4, the day before Election Day, and they’ll be able to drop off their ballots at any county board of elections in the state, or any of the polling stations in their county. But those ballots must still be received by 7:30 p.m. E.T. on November 5.

About 16.6 percent of North Carolina’s registered voters live in areas affected by Hurricane Helene, totaling 1,275,054 people in 25 counties. Of that number, 292,836 people are registered Democrats, 480,097 Republicans, and 490,140 unaffiliated. The rest of the voters are registered with third parties like the Green Party, Justice for All, Libertarian, No Labels, and We The People.

The right has pushed a number of conspiracies on the hurricane, from claims that Democrats are withholding aid from Republican areas to a far more outrageous conspiracy that the federal government controls the weather. Some local Republicans have taken steps to debunk these lies, but it doesn’t help that Donald Trump is pushing them himself. If Republicans in North Carolina end up having difficulty voting as they recover from Hurricane Helene, they should probably blame their own elected officials.

Amid active devastation in the American South wrought by unprecedented hurricanes, Republicans are busy with one thing: attacking Vice President Kamala Harris for dismantling their weather-related conspiracies.

Speaking with Fox News on Wednesday, Missouri Senator Eric Schmitt seemingly torched Harris for actually responding to the disaster, going so far as to claim it was “really awkward” that the vice president would “insert herself” into phone calls to affected states about federal relief funds.

“Your reaction to what seems to be this preemptive attempt by Biden and Harris and the media to silence critics of any aspect of the government’s response by calling it all disinformation?” asked host Laura Ingraham.

“Yeah, this is a kind of a standard playbook now, Laura, for anything they don’t like to hear,” Schmitt said. “They label it misinformation or disinformation. They’ve tried to censor this stuff before during Covid because … it wasn’t the regime’s narrative, and here we go again.”

“There are real stories, there are people hurting who are not getting help,” the MAGA Republican continued. “In fact, you know, relief efforts by private citizens were being blocked.... The federal government’s response here, led by Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, have completely failed the people of North Carolina.”

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 conspiratorially suggested that the hurricanes are a government manipulation.

Some of those lies have had real-world consequences, convincing Americans in heavily affected regions that they shouldn’t apply for FEMA’s disaster relief based on the lie that the agency is out of money.

Speaking with CNN on Tuesday, former Republican communications strategist Douglas Heye lamented how Donald 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 good. That’s malicious.”