MSNBC’s Willie Geist slammed what he saw as Donald Trump’s “particularly disgusting lie” about the Biden administration’s efforts supporting Americans affected by Hurricane Helene.
On Tuesday’s Morning Joe, Geist reacted to the Republican nominee’s false claims a day earlier that the White House was ignoring the disaster which has claimed the lives of over 130 people and left hundreds more missing, according to the Associated Press.
In a series of clips, Trump was shown wrongly claiming that Georgia’s GOP Gov. Brian Kemp had struggled to get hold of President Joe Biden or outright denying they had spoken.
“The governor’s doing a very good job,” Trump told reporters during his visit to Valdosta, Georgia, in one of the clips. “He’s having a hard time getting the president on the phone. I guess they’re not being responsive—the federal government is not being responsive.”
He also took a swing at Vice President Kamala Harris, saying she was “out someplace campaigning, looking for money.”
Another clip showed Trump incorrectly refuting a reporter who said that Kemp spoke with Biden the day before. Kemp said publicly that Biden had called him Sunday afternoon. “He just said: ‘Hey, what do you need?’” Kemp said, quoting Biden. “And I told him, you know, 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 that.”
Biden himself called out his predecessor Monday when a journalist asked about Trump’s allegations that he’d been ignoring Kemp.
“He is lying,” Biden said from the Oval Office Monday. “Let me get this straight: He is lying, and the governor told me he was lying.” Biden went on to say he “doesn’t know” why Trump “does this.”
“The reason I get so angry about it—I don’t care about what he says about me, but I care, I care what he communicates to the people that are in need,” Biden continued. “He implies that we’re not doing everything possible. We are.”
“This is a particularly disgusting lie,” Geist said on Morning Joe Tuesday, speaking to Jonathan Lemire about the saga. “When the people there need help, suggesting that the White House and FEMA—because Democrats don’t want Donald Trump to win, of course it all comes back to him, they’re turning their back on him.”
“He’s also suggested that the White House and this federal government is ignoring MAGA supporters in red counties,” Geist continued. “That’s of course not true. Just—not even in this moment of destruction and devastation and people needing clarity and help so badly [he] can’t even put his ego and his cheap insults aside.”
Lemire agreed, saying Trump “refuses to do it.”
“Rooting against the country is one of the themes from Donald Trump,” Lemire said. “And this is a moment where this is a particularly dangerous lie because if he’s out there saying: ‘Well, hey, the federal government’s ignoring those who are impacted by this storm,’ that may discourage those impacted by the storm from even seeking help.”
He went on to accuse Trump of “only thinking about himself,” adding that he’d potentially been a “strain on resources” in Georgia with his visit on Monday. “He wanted to go to have the political photo-op,” Lemire said. “Vice President Harris says she will go in the days ahead, but she wants to make sure that she’s not an unnecessary distraction from recovery efforts.”
