President Joe Biden fumed at Donald Trump on Monday while rejecting another one of the former president’s false claims, this one relating to relief efforts for Hurricane Helene.
Biden was in the Oval Office holding a virtual meeting with North Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper when he was asked by a reporter about Trump baselessly accusing him of ignoring Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp’s calls. Becoming visibly frustrated, Biden called Trump out for “lying,” and noted that Kemp himself has refuted his fanciful version of events.
“He is lying. Let me get this straight: He is lying, and the governor told me he was lying,” Biden said.
“I don’t know why he does this, and the reason I get so angry about this—I don’t care about what he says about me, but I care what he communicates to the people that are in need,” continued Biden, who later dismissed the notion that him choosing to be in Delaware over the weekend was inappropriate. “He implies that we’re not doing everything possible. We are… and I assume you heard the Republican governor of Georgia talk about that. He was on the phone with me more than once. So that’s simply not true. And it’s irresponsible.”
Earlier Monday morning, Kemp made no note of any sort of communication hindrances that Trump had suggested at a news conference at a furniture store in Valdosta, Georgia: that Kemp “has been calling,” but “the president hasn’t been able to get him.”
“I just spoke to—the president just called me yesterday afternoon. I missed him and called him right back,” Kemp told reporters—comments that Kamala Harris’ campaign later highlighted. “And he just said, ‘Hey, what do you need?’ And I told him we got what we need. We’ll work through the federal process. He offered that if there’s other things we need, just to call him directly, which I appreciate.”
Trump has been making a similar claim related to hurricane relief: that Democrats have been denying aid to Republican-majority parts of North Carolina. Yet when pressed to support his theory by an NBC News reporter on the ground in Georgia, Trump merely said, “Just take a look.”
Trump’s flimsy-at-best accusations were also on display Monday in a social media post in which he declared that a photograph of Harris being briefed via phone by the director of FEMA was “fake” and “staged.” His reason: “you have to plug the cord into the phone for it to work.”
Harris was using a cell phone.
