The following is a lightly-edited transcript of the October 1, 2024 episode of The Daily Blast podcast. To listen to it, click here.This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR Network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.Greg Sargent: Right now, western North Carolina is in the midst of a full-blown catastrophe. Due to extreme damage unleashed by Hurricane Helene, towns have been destroyed, roads have been washed out, people are frantically trying to locate friends and relatives, and there have been dozens of deaths. Enter Donald Trump. In a pair of truly ghoulish messages on social media, Trump declared that the federal government and North Carolina’s Democratic governor, Roy Cooper, are deliberately neglecting MAGA parts of the state. Trump said President Biden and Vice President Harris are deliberately letting Americans drown in the state and elsewhere in the South. Today, we’re talking to North Carolina’s Democratic Party chair, Anderson Clayton, about the horrors that the state is going through and about Trump’s reaction to it. Thanks so much for taking the time to talk to us, Anderson.Anderson Clayton: Thank you for uplifting an important part of our state right now that needs it, Greg.Sargent: Anderson, the stories coming out of the western part of the state are just heartbreaking. Can you bring us up to date on what’s going on? Clayton: As folks know, almost 35 counties across western North Carolina are under a federal advisement right now for emergency services after Hurricane Helene came through and ultimately destroyed huge parts of the western part of the state. Asheville and Barnardsville and places like that being the closest impacted, places like Spruce Pine and Mitchell County right now that are still going to be impacted. Folks who are needing help or would like to know more or are being impacted by it can go to readync.gov and be able to find out more information on the ground about how you can access shelters, traffic. Right now they’ve closed off I-40 when you hit Statesville, which is in Iredell County in North Carolina, telling people not to travel to the western part of the state because the terrain out there is not traversable yet, and we want to make sure that emergency personnel are the folks that are getting to have the priority of the roadways right now throughout the western part. Sargent: It’s looking like the rescue of residents is being complicated by cell phone services being down, rescue vehicles are having trouble getting through, gas supplies are running low, and people are having to make these really hard choices about whether to try to move with the gas they have. I think Asheville’s mayor described this as “historic devastation.” The pictures we’re seeing of Asheville underwater, whole towns destroyed. It’s just a horror. What can we all do? Listeners and anyone else, what can we all do right now to make a difference? Clayton: Governor Roy Cooper has opened up a way that you can donate directly to Hurricane Relief. So folks can go to nc.gov/donate, and we’ll make sure we’ve got it on the state party website, too, for the North Carolina Dems. The website’s been published on the governor’s website front page just to make sure that people know where they can support if you are out of state. Supplies is the biggest thing right now. We’re hearing out of Asheville the need for water. We know that water treatment plants were flooded from this crisis, so they’re having to either rebuild treatment plants or wait for the water to go down in them to be able to actually fix whatever may be wrong with them right now. So we’re expecting water delays for at least and up to two weeks in Asheville and surrounding counties. But it wasn’t just places like Buncombe County that got hit, which is one of the hardest things to note. To your point, cell phone access has been down across that entire region. Places like Polk and Henderson counties still have not heard from some folks out there yet that have been lacking that access. We know that it is a true tragedy for just the infrastructure that we’re seeing lost. This changed the entire geography of western North Carolina. Roadways entirely were wiped out. We have bridges going to homes that are up in the hollers in the mountains that are not able to be accessible right now. So we definitely still see this as a full search and rescue in North Carolina and trying to make sure that we’re getting out to people that may be in the more rural and remote and isolated locations in western North Carolina. It’s going to take time. We are really grateful though; the National Guard and over 11 states have sent in folks to help us out. We know that Governor Cooper is on the ground today in Asheville. He waited until the roads were safe to travel to be honest and to make sure that he was not going at a time that would be inconvenient for emergency personnel out there, which we thought was definitely important. He’s going to make sure that our FEMA director is staying out there with him until the situation stabilizes more and that we’ve rescued everyone that we need to. I’ve gotten calls from folks all over the country right now: if you’re missing somebody in western North Carolina or have not heard from them, you can call 211, and please fill out the missing persons with their location and their full description. Make sure that you do a wellness check on somebody if you heard from them two days ago, but you haven’t heard from them since, and that you also dial that number 211 in the state. Sargent: As far as I can tell: Republicans and Democrats pulling together at a time of disaster, not attacking each other, with one exception. Donald Trump. He enters the picture. Now look, I get that people are not going to want to think about Trump at a time like this, but Trump is running for president, and what he’s just done is a reminder of what kind of president he has been and would be again. He figured out a way to pretend that MAGA parts of the state are being neglected deliberately. He claimed that a photo on social media showing Vice President Harris working the phones on the disaster had been staged. What’s your response to all this?Clayton: No one right now should be stoking division at a time where we still have missing people in a state like this. To your point, we have seen Republicans working together, local elected state legislative leaders, and Democrats and Republicans that have been making sure that resources get up to the western part of the state, doing supply drives together. What you see on the ground is a lot different than what you see represented in the Republican Party nationally right now for just how communities are rallying. Roy Cooper as a governor does not care whether you’re a Republican or a Democrat right now. He cares that you’re a North Carolinian and that you’re struggling or that you need help or that someone in your family is still missing and you don’t know where they are. We have definitely had folks that we know are still out there that may have walked or had to leave their cars because of flooding. There was someone that we heard the other day, his son had walked almost 11 miles to get home. He had no idea where he was or if he was all right, but he had gotten there through the woods. Just making sure that we’re taking care of people, and Donald Trump doesn’t seem to have any interest in doing that or making sure that people in North Carolina are OK. Sargent: He’s just doing something altogether different from what most Republicans are doing. Republicans are calling for everyone to pull together. Republicans are not saying what Trump is saying. Trump claimed Governor Brian Kemp of Georgia, which is also getting hammered, had trouble getting President Biden on the phone. But Kemp then said he got Biden quickly and Biden offered Kemp whatever he needs. I think Kemp said he appreciated that. Virginia Governor Glenn Youngkin, a Republican, also praised the federal response. It’s Trump and MAGA influencers who are using this disaster to inflame their people. Republicans aren’t doing this. Democrats aren’t doing this. What are you personally hearing from other Republicans on the ground? What’s the chatter?Clayton: I’ll be honest, today I was talking with the Iredell Dems chair, Beth Kendall. Anybody that’s interested, if you’re in Statesville right now or any of the surrounding areas…Like I said earlier, I-40 is closed getting out to the western part of the state through Statesville, but our Democratic headquarters out there is still doing supply drives and actually making sure that we’ve got tractor trailers that are busing supplies up to Watauga County and counties surrounding like Polk County as well in that region. I was on the phone with Beth Kendall talking about what we could do to coordinate more resources, and she had someone, a Moms for Liberty voter, that came in and she said, I wish that our side was doing this and had their headquarters open. It doesn’t have to be something that’s polarizing to folks. Sargent: It doesn’t, but that’s what Trump does. I think we need to talk a little bit about what this says about a second Trump term, what it would be like. He was president during a global disaster, Covid. His incompetence and derangement caused untold numbers of needless deaths. But additionally, he used Covid as a chance to divide people. He said nasty and vicious things about blue states and their need for federal help and so forth. We don’t need to recap all that here. But when Trump falsely claims Biden and Harris are doing the thing he actually did do, it’s not only a grotesque lie, it’s also a reminder that this is how he sees the world, including at times of disaster. Shouldn’t people take that under advisement right now? Clayton: I think that folks have to look at the fact that something like Project 2025 that’s been endorsed by Donald Trump wants to disband something like the National Weather Service that actually targeted where this hurricane would hit landfall right within 25 miles of where it actually did. Something like that has been a huge resource federally.
https://newrepublic.com/article/186553/transcript-trump-already-pushing-ugly-hateful-lie-hurricane