Trump Is Suddenly on a Very Strange Disaster Aid Kick

Shortly after receiving an ultimatum from a frustrated North Carolina Republican, the Trump administration Thursday announced millions in federal disaster aid to the Tar Heel State for last year’s Hurricane Helene.

“I am proud to approve nearly $32 Million Dollars [sic] in assistance for the Great State of North Carolina,” Trump posted on Truth Social.

The president also announced disaster aid to Kansas, Wisconsin, and South Dakota. In each post, he was sure to note that the funds were going to states in which he’s had electoral successes in the past. In North Carolina, for example, he wrote, “I WON BIG all six times” (six, that is, because he included Republican primaries in his count). Notably, in his post about Wisconsin, Trump repeated his false assertions that he actually won the state in 2020.

Trump credited North Carolina Republicans such as Senator Ted Budd for requesting the aid. Two days prior, Budd had skewered Kristi Noem’s Department of Homeland Security for delays in the disbursement of $5.95 billion in Federal Emergency Management Agency funds—$4.2 billion of which the state was reportedly still waiting for as of June.

“Here we are, nine months later, we still haven’t seen the reimbursements,” Budd told CNN Tuesday. The senator assigned significant blame to Noem, citing her controversial policy requiring all DHS expenditures exceeding $100,000 to receive her approval.

“We’ve let leadership know we’re going to place holds on all DHS nominees until we get an appropriate dialog and response on the outstanding invoices that have not been paid to western North Carolina from FEMA,” he said.

Later that day, Noem announced FEMA grants to North Carolina amounting to $12 million.

On X Thursday, Budd responded to Trump’s announcement with gratitude. “Dramatically addressing the backlog of projects waiting for funding is great news for [western North Carolina] communities as we approach this storm’s 1-year anniversary,” the senator wrote.

Deputy Secretary of State Christopher Landau threatened Thursday to deport noncitizens that don’t demonstrate the requisite amount of sadness and sobriety about Charlie Kirk’s death.

“In light of yesterday’s horrific assassination of a leading political figure, I want to underscore that foreigners who glorify violence and hatred are not welcome visitors to our country,” Landau wrote on X. “I have been disgusted to see some on social media praising, rationalizing, or making light of the event, and have directed our consular officials to undertake appropriate action.”

He also asked to be notified of any such “comments by foreigners” so that the State Department could “keep Americans safe.” In a separate post, the secretary said people should reply to his post with examples, and he’d “direct consular officials to monitor the comments to this post.”

Beneath Landau’s post, users on X submitted posts they’d seen making jokes about Kirk’s death. Each time, the secretary responded with an image of the Department of State seal, captioned with “El Quitavisas,” which roughly translates to “The Visa Revoker.”

Disturbingly, some of the posts Landau responded to didn’t include jokes. One post sent to Landau was of a news group describing Kirk as an “extremist,” which he was. Apparently, accurately describing a public figure’s political statements is now a privilege reserved only for American citizens.

In the aftermath of Kirk’s death Wednesday, some Republican lawmakers have begun a push for censorship online. Right-wing influencers such as Libs of TikTok and Laura Loomer have launched sweeping campaigns to dox and intimidate anyone whose characterization of Kirk doesn’t match their own.

Landau’s threat represents the latest escalation in the Trump administration’s campaign to strip noncitizens of First Amendment protections that began with the government’s vicious crackdown on foreign students’ pro-Palestinian speech.

Republican messaging in the wake of Charlie Kirk’s assassination is tearing the party apart.

Conservatives across the country seemingly interpreted Kirk’s death as an opportunity for more violence, intimating online that the brutal attack against the 31-year-old firebrand was a sign of “war” with their political opposition. But not every Republican was willing to hop on the dogpile.

Senator Thom Tillis was disturbed by his party’s language, telling National Journal’s Nancy Vu Thursday that he was disgusted by the way that Republicans had co-opted Kirk’s death to rack up digital attention.

“What I was really disgusted by yesterday is a couple of talking heads that sees this as an opportunity to say we’re at war so that they could get some of our conservative followers lathered up over this,” Tillis said. “It seems like a cheap, disgusting, awful way to pretend like you’re a leader of a conservative movement. And there were two in particular that I found particularly disgusting.”

Tillis did not clarify which two comments he was referring to, though plenty of conservatives have shared their own twisted takes on Kirk’s murder.

Figureheads leading the charge included Laura Loomer, who decried the political left as a “national security threat”; Libs of TikTok creator Chaya Raichik, who blatantly stated, “THIS IS WAR”; former Trump strategist Steve Bannon, who claimed that Kirk was a “casualty of war”; and podcast bro Joey Mannarino, who demanded that the Democratic Party be “classified as a domestic terror organization.”

Donald Trump, for his own part, issued a four-minute video message in which he condemned American liberals for the political climate that led to Kirk’s assassination, admonishing them for drawing historical parallels between his administration and authoritarian regimes throughout history.

“This kind of rhetoric is directly responsible for the terrorism that we’re seeing in our country today, and it must stop right now,” Trump said, promising to hunt and root out left-leaning political ideologies that oppose his agenda.

Nebraska Representative Don Bacon, however, joined Tillis in pushing back. Bacon told NBC News that he wished Trump would focus on bringing the country back together in the aftermath of Kirk’s murder, rather than continue to tear it apart.

“But he’s a populist, and populists dwell on anger,” Bacon said.

In their fury, Republicans have leveraged Kirk’s murder as evidence that they are political victims—despite the fact that they currently hold the majority of power in every branch of government—all while ignoring the reality that political violence is a bipartisan issue that has also taken the lives of several prominent Democrats recently.

“I have to remind people, we had Democrats killed in Minnesota too, right?” Bacon added, referring to Minnesota state Representative Melissa Hortman and her husband, both of whom were fatally shot in June by a Trump supporter.

President Donald Trump inexplicably claimed that Missouri’s 2024 general election had been rigged, using that falsehood as an excuse to try to convince state Republicans to redistrict.

Writing on X Thursday, Missouri Times editor Jake Kroesen said that during a meeting of Missouri state Senate Republicans the day before, Governor Mike Kehoe had called in with a surprising guest: the president of the United States.

And Trump had a mission: convince the lawmakers to pass the state’s newly gerrymandered congressional map that would erase the Democratic seat in Kansas City.

Trump ranted to lawmakers about how popular he was for about 20 minutes, reciting inflated poll numbers and claiming he could even win a third term in office.

“Trump reportedly told Senators that polling data he has seen shows he is more popular than Reagan,” Kroesen wrote. “He added that his Missouri numbers in 2024 were lower than he had anticipated and claimed the numbers were possibly rigged.”

Trump then told lawmakers he “needed their help securing another seat to maintain control of the House.”

When Trump left the call, Kehoe reportedly said, “See how hard it is to say no to him?”

In 2024, Trump won nearly 59 percent of the vote in Missouri with 1,751,027 votes, beating out Democratic challenger Kamala Harris by more than 550,000 votes. Still, he suggested that the election had been rigged in a state he’d handily won.

Trump’s efforts to personally bully state lawmakers into gerrymandering district maps betray his desperation for Republicans to keep control of the House and Senate in the upcoming midterm elections.

President Donald Trump told the country that his federal crackdown on Washington, D.C. would focus on ridding the streets of violent crime, theft, and gang violence.

In reality, that effort has been an extension of his deportation campaign, as a whopping 40 percent of arrests made since the occupation have to do with immigration, according to recent data collected by The Associated Press.

The Trump administration says that it’s arrested more than 2,300 people: around 12 for homicide suspicion, 20 for alleged gang membership, and a few hundred for drug-related crimes. But more than 940 people have been arrested by Immigrations and Customs Enforcement, more than any of the aforementioned categories.

While the Trump administration claims that deportation and violent crime go hand in hand, it’s hard to see how snatching UberEats drivers off their scooters midroute, harassing anyone who looks Latino at checkpoints, and forcing street vendors to stay inside out of fear helps curtail violent crime.

The president said he was going to “rescue our nation’s capital from crime, bloodshed, bedlam, and squalor, and worse,” after the Big Balls mugging. The results of his efforts have not reflected that.