Former President Donald Trump made his first appearance with Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp in four years on Oct. 4 as they surveyed the damage left by Hurricane Helene in the battleground state.
The Republican leaders, at odds until recently, received an afternoon briefing from local officials in Evans before delivering remarks at a press conference.
Trump, asked about the state of his relationship with the governor, said: “It’s great.”
Prior to the 2020 election, the pair seemed to have a good rapport, with Trump publicly backing Kemp’s bid for governor. The relationship soured when Kemp declined to support Trump when he questioned the integrity of the 2020 election and its results in battleground states across the country, including Georgia.
Waving off a reporter’s reminder of that tiff, the former president repeated, “No, no, no, it’s great. No, we work together. We’ve always worked together very well—very well. Really.”
Trump stopped in Georgia hours before he was slated to speak at a town hall in Fayetteville, North Carolina—another state decimated by Helene.
The storm made landfall in Florida’s Big Bend region on Sept. 26 as a Category 4 hurricane. It proceeded to pummel the Southeast with devastating flooding that, in some places, wiped out entire towns. At least 215 people have now been confirmed dead, though search and rescue efforts are still underway in western North Carolina, where residents have been stranded by flooding and destroyed roads.
In Georgia, where the storm claimed 33 lives, Kemp noted that it had also ravaged the agricultural state’s primary industry.
“Hurricane Helene has wiped out much of this year’s crop across the board,” he said. That includes 35 percent of the state’s cotton crop and 30 percent of its peanut crop.
Meanwhile, 14 of the state’s dairies are still without power, 222 poultry houses were destroyed, and many livestock facilities also sustained damage.
“And as I told the president earlier, approximately 4 million acres of timberland have been impacted, and 48,000 acres of pecans have been damaged or destroyed as a result of this storm,” Kemp said.
Republicans, including the former president, have been criticizing the Biden administration’s response to the disaster.
“It’s been a terrible response from the White House. They’re missing a billion dollars that was used for another purpose, and nobody’s seen anything like that,” Trump said, referencing the accusation that the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) allocated $1.4 billion for rehousing illegal immigrants over the past two years.
FEMA is expected to run out of disaster relief funds before the end of hurricane season on Nov. 30, Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas told reporters on Oct. 2.
The agency has pushed back on claims that those funds were diverted to illegal immigrants.
