In the wake of hurricanes Helene and Milton, Trump is peddling two big lies about federal aid to the devastated areas: (1) That FEMA aid has been diverted to illegal migrants, and (2) the Biden administration and Vice President Harris are withholding disaster aid from Republican areas.
There isn’t a scrap of truth in this. When ABC News’ Martha Radditz asked J. D. Vance about it, Trump’s running mate was too cagey to directly repeat the lies. Instead, what he said was, “Trump said” that FEMA is going to migrants, and the disaster response efforts in Appalachia are “incompetent.”
Is that lying? In this context, yes. You don’t avoid responsibility for a lie by prefacing it with “so-and-so said” and then repeating it. And when you falsely call a properly organized and conducted disaster response “incompetent,” that’s lying directly.
Radditz asked Vance a straight-up question: Was FEMA aid diverted to migrants, and withheld from Republican areas? The only honest answer is, “No.” Instead, Vance danced around the question, defending those lies. Watch the video below, and read story here.
The irony is that Trump, while president, diverted FEMA disaster relief money to his anti-migrant border efforts; and just the day before Vance’s appearance on Radditz’s show, Trump threatened to withheld federal disaster relief from California; read about that here.