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Donald Trump to visit Houston to meet Storm Harvey survivors Donald Trump to visit Houston to meet Harvey survivors
(about 3 hours later)
Donald Trump will travel to Houston and the Louisiana city of Lake Charles on Saturday to meet survivors of Storm Harvey, one of the worst natural disasters in US history. Donald Trump set off for Houston on Saturday tasked with bringing comfort and hope to flood victims – and with avoiding the mistakes of George W Bush.
Trump first visited the region on Tuesday but stayed clear of the disaster zone, saying he did not want to hamper rescue efforts. Instead, he met state and local leaders and first responders. He was criticised, however, for largely focusing on the logistics of the government response rather than the suffering of residents. The president is expected to meet survivors of Hurricane Harvey and to witness first-hand the devastation that has presented a major test for his administration.
The White House said Trump would first travel to Houston to meet survivors and volunteers who assisted in relief efforts, and then move on to Lake Charles, another area hit by the storm. He will have to navigate not just receding flood waters but perilous political currents similar to those which damaged Bush in the wake of Hurricane Katrina in 2005.
The Trump administration has asked Congress for $7.85bn (£6bn) for response and initial recovery efforts. The White House homeland security adviser Tom Bossert has said aid funding requests would come in stages as more became known about the storm’s impact. Melania Trump is accompanying her husband in what aides hope will be a gaffe-free inspection of relief efforts in Houston and further up the Gulf coast at Lake Charles, Louisiana.
The Texas governor, Greg Abbott, has said his state may need more than $125bn. He said 440,000 Texans had already applied for federal financial disaster assistance, and $79m had been approved so far. Departing for Texas and Louisiana with @FLOTUS Melania right now @JBA_NAFW. We will see you soon. America is with you! pic.twitter.com/z3bHVdJVPr
Harvey came ashore last Friday as the strongest storm to hit Texas in more than 50 years, and lingered around the Gulf of Mexico coast for days, dumping record amounts of rain. Trump set the stage on Friday by signalling a request to Congress for a $14.5bn down payment for storm victims and a declaration making Sunday a national day of prayer.
The storm has displaced more than 1 million people, and 50 are feared to have died in the flooding. More than two-thirds of Harris county in Texas, which encompasses Houston, was at one point covered with 45cm (18ins) or more of water, officials have said. Flanked in the Oval office by leaders from the American Red Cross, the Salvation Army and Southern Baptist Disaster Relief, the president invited all Americans “to join us as we continue to pray for those who have lost family members or friends, and for those who are suffering in this time of crisis”.
As the water receded, many returned to survey the damage. In Orange, about 125 miles (200km) east of Houston, Sam Dougharty, 36, found waist-high water in his backyard and barn. His family’s house smelled of raw sewage and was still flooded to the ankles. The sombre tone contrasted with campaign-style rhetoric about crowd size during his visit to Texas earlier in the week, as well as tweets marvelling at the storm’s power, which had prompted accusations that Trump was temperamentally unfit for the role of consoler-in-chief.
“We never had water here. This is family land. My aunt’s owned it for 40 years and never had water here,” he said. In addition to projecting empathy on Saturday, Trump must manage a tangle of hurricane-related consequences which complicate his fiscal, immigration and border security policies.
Jeff Lindner, a meteorologist with the Harris County flood control district, said the nearly 127cm of rainfall in Clear Creek was a once in a 40,000-year event. The scale of the disaster loomed clearer on Friday as rescuers worked their way through the 300-mile swath of south-east Texas drenched by Harvey. Some communities remained submerged; others lacked water and power. Texas officials estimate more than 185,000 homes were damaged and 9,000 destroyed. The Red Cross said 42,000 people were in shelters. At least 45 people died.
The Houston Astros baseball team will play their first home game since Harvey on Saturday. Some of the tens of thousands of people forced into shelters by the storm will attend the game against the New York Mets, where the Houston mayor, Sylvester Turner, will throw out the first pitch and a moment of silence is planned for those who died. A category 4 hurricane when it made landfall last week, Harvey still packed a wallop as a tropical depression as it moved north-east, triggering flood warnings in Kentucky and Tennessee.
Harvey came on the 12th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, which killed about 1,800 people in and around New Orleans. George W Bush’s administration was roundly criticised for its botched early response to the storm. Trump has given an uneven response to the first national disaster of his presidency.
A new storm, Irma, strengthened on Friday into a category 3 hurricane. It is currently hundreds of miles from land but is forecast to possibly hit Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic and Haiti by the middle of next week. Last week, he swiftly granted the Texas governor Gregg Abbott’s request for a disaster declaration, releasing federal funds, and has remained in close contact with state officials.
Brock Long, his pick to run the Federal Emergency Management Agency (Fema), has proved capable, according to analysts.
The $14.5bn request to Congress - $7.8bn to be released in coming days, the rest at the end of the month – will cheer state officials who hope to eventually gain $120bn in federal help.
But as the storm barrelled in last week, Trump struck discordant notes.
“Wow – Now experts are calling #Harvey a once in 500 year flood!” he tweeted, sounding more awed than horrified. “125 MPH winds!”
He pardoned Joe Arpaio, a controversial former sheriff, in the early hours of the storm. Asked about timing, Trump said television ratings would be higher than normal.
The former Celebrity Apprentice host also noted that Long, the Fema chief, had “become very famous on television over the last couple of days”.
And on a visit to Corpus Cristi and Austin on Tuesday, he seemed more excited than sympathetic, telling a rally: “What a crowd, what a turnout.”
Critics complained that his subsequent tweet – “After witnessing first hand the horror & devastation caused by Hurricane Harvey, my heart goes out even more so to the great people of Texas!” – was false because he did not personally witness storm damage nor meet any victims.
Houston, which bore the brunt of Harvey’s wrath, will give the president ample opportunity to do both. He is also expected to meet the mayor, Sylvester Turner, a Democrat who has vowed to personally defend undocumented immigrants from any Trump-inspired crackdown.
The storm has complicated Trump’s agenda in Washington.
Massive federal aid for Texas and Louisiana will undermine efforts by the White House and congressional Republicans to curb the deficit.
But administration officials have refused to back away from the president’s threat to stake government operations on funding for what was arguably his most signature campaign promise.
“The president’s very much committed to building the wall,” the White House press secretary, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, told reporters Friday when asked if Trump was willing to withdraw the threat of a government shutdown over the project.
The president faces an additional dilemma over whether to accept an offer of aid from Mexico, his favourite punching bag. Abbott said he would accept.
Harvey also put Trump’s denial of climate change under fresh scrutiny. Experts said global warming aggravated the storm.
Trump’s overriding political challenge in Houston and Louisiana, however, will be to not resemble Bush in the wake of Katrina. Bush appeared slow to respond, detached from the suffering and deluded in his confidence in Michael Brown, the hapless head of Fema in 2005. “Brownie, you’re doing a heck of a job,” said Bush, misplaced praise which haunted the rest of his presidency.
On the eve of Harvey making landfall, the Republican senator Chuck Grassley tweeted a warning to Trump to not repeat Bush’s errors. The president tweeted back: “Got your message loud and clear. We have fantastic people on the ground, got there long before #Harvey. So far, so good!”