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Florida governor Ron DeSantis reportedly refused to take a call from vice president Kamala Harris about disaster recovery in the aftermath of Hurricane Helene, the latest sign of a tense partisan atmosphere derailing the response to the catastrophic storm.
“Kamala was trying to reach out, and we didn’t answer,” a DeSantis aide told NBC News, adding that the calls “seemed political.”
Speaking to reporters on Monday, Harris lambasted DeSantis.
“Moments of crisis, if nothing else, should really be the moment that anyone who calls themselves a leader says, I’m going to put politics aside and put the people first,” Harris said.
“It’s utterly irresponsible and it is selfish and it is about political gamesmanship instead of doing the job that you took an oath to do,” she added.
When asked about the situation on Monday, the White House pushed the spotlight back on DeSantis.
“The governor, it’s up to him if he wants to respond to us or not,” press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said on Monday.
DeSantis has said he missed a call about the storm from President Biden because he was on a flight at the time. The Republican also declined to take part in Biden’s visit last week to Florida, a repeat of when he didn’t accompany the president to visit Florida’s Big Bend region last year in the aftermath of Hurricane Idalia.
The Independent has contacted the governor’s office for comment.
If there are any tensions between the White House and the Florida governor’s mansion, both sides will want them resolved quickly, as Hurricane Milton has rapidly intensified into a Category 5 Hurricane in the Gulf of Mexico and is expected to hit the Tampa Bay Area around Wednesday.
Helene made landfall in the same region on September 26 as a Category 4 Hurricane with 140 mph winds. Residents compared the impact to a nuclear bomb going off.
As of this weekend, the storm has killed at least 20 people in the Sunshine State, and intially left nearly 1m Floridians without power.
After the storm hit, DeSantis claimed to “have it handled,” regaring disaster relief and called for more efforts to be focused on other hard-hit states like North Carolina.
North Carolina has been the nucleus both for the destruction of Hurricane Helene, and attempts by prominent Republicans, including Donald Trump, to spin the hurricane into a partisan scandal.
The former president and his campaign have spread a variety of false and misleading claims about the disaster, including that federal officials are faking photo-ops, ignoring conservative communities, and only offering $750 to victims.
North Carolina officials themselves, meanwhile, have praised the White House’s response to the historic storm.
“For anybody who thinks that any level of government, anybody here could have been prepared precisely for what we’re dealing with here, clearly, are clueless,” Republican Senator Thom Tillis said at a recent media briefing. “They’re doing a great job.”
“The last thing that the victims of Helene need right now is political posturing, finger-pointing, or conspiracy theories that only hurt the response effort,” he added in a constituent email.
North Carolina state senator Kevin Corbin, another Republican, has also condemned “conspiracy theory junk” being spread about the storm.
