President Biden called on Americans Wednesday to “put politics aside” to focus on Hurricane Helene recovery efforts — moments before stepping on his own message by saying that anyone who doubts climate change’s role in the disaster “must be brain dead.”
“In a moment like this, we put politics aside, at least we should put it all aside, and we have here,” the retiring 81-year-old president said during a recovery briefing in Raleigh, NC.
“There are no Democrats or Republicans, there are only Americans, and our job is to help as many people as we can, as quickly as we can, and as thoroughly as we can.”
The consoler-in-chief, seated next to the Tar Heel State’s Democratic governor, Roy Cooper, and emergency officials after an aerial tour of the Asheville area, pivoted moments later to an attack on the mostly Republican skeptics about the role of fossil fuel use in severe weather.
“Nobody can deny the impact of [the] climate crisis anymore — at least I hope they don’t. They must be brain dead if they do,” Biden jabbed.
“Scientists report that with warming oceans powering more intense rains, storms like Helene are getting stronger and stronger — they’re not going to get less, they’re going to get stronger. Today in North Carolina, I saw the impacts of that fury.”
At least 189 people have died from the storm across six states, with at least 70 of those deaths recorded in North Carolina alone. A further 100 residents of the state are unaccounted for.
The remark about Biden’s political adversaries being “brain dead” quickly sparked an outcry — after the president himself took criticism for what residents say has been a slow emergency response in the hardest-hit areas.
Former President Donald Trump’s campaign tweeted sarcastically: “Biden — the uniter-in-chief — says Americans ‘must be braindead’ if they ‘deny’ the hurricane damage is because of climate change.”
“Comatose and cognitively declined Joe Biden is calling Americans like me brain dead. This is a joke, Right?” reacted conservative commentator Leo Terrell.
Biden has come under fire for his management of the storm — including the fact that he monitored the initial days of the devastation impacting the Southeast from his Delaware beach house.
The president bristled at such criticism Monday when questioned by an Associated Press journalist about whether he should have commanded the federal response from the White House.
“It’s called a telephone!” Biden chided.
The president also has had to walk back his initial claim Sunday that no further resources were needed to respond to the storm — saying at his Wednesday afternoon briefing with Cooper that Congress will have to approve more funding.
“It’s going to cost billions of dollars to deal with this storm… and Congress has an obligation to ensure states have the resources they need,” Biden said.
The outgoing president visited North Carolina and South Carolina on Wednesday while Vice President Kamala Harris, the Democratic presidential nominee in the Nov. 5 election, visited storm-hit Augusta, Ga.
Harris, who was on a West Coast campaign swing over the weekend, has also taken criticism from Republicans, including for tweeting an image of herself addressing the crisis from Air Force Two — wearing headphones that weren’t plugged into her phone — and for forgoing annual hurricane preparedness briefings that were a staple of her predecessor Mike Pence’s calendar.
“The people in western North Carolina feel let down, deservedly so,” Rep. Chuck Edwards (R-NC), whose district includes some of the worst-impacted areas, told NewsNation Monday.
“The response has been disappointing,” Edwards said. “We’ve begun to see some resources brought in today, but the storm was over about 80 hours ago. The storm was over about 10 a.m. Friday. We knew that the storm was coming and only today are we beginning to see the first FEMA employees and trailers and helicopters come in.”
