On Thursday, the Trump Campaign announced plans to visit the areas in Louisiana that have been ravaged by the worst flood the state has seen since Hurricane Katrina. Governor John Bel Edwards, however, was having none of Trump’s bullshit and told the candidate that he would not tolerate him using the victims of the flood for political gain.
Donald Trump hasn’t called the governor to inform him of his visit,” a spokesman for Edwards’ office said in a statement Thursday evening. “We welcome him to LA but not for a photo-op. Instead we hope he’ll consider volunteering or making a sizable donation to the LA Flood Relief Fund to help the victims of the storm.
Over 40,000 homes have been damaged, more than 30,000 people were rescued as a result of the flooding caused by rain that lasted days. The people of Louisiana, many of whom have just rebuilt their lives after Hurricane Katrina destroyed them more than a decade ago, are once again reeling from the effects of flooding. When word leaked that Trump planned to visit the state on Friday everyone saw it for what it was: an attempt to use the pain of these people to win votes and the governor wanted him to know (nicely) that it was not going to be tolerated.
On Friday morning, Trump Campaign Manager Kellyanne Conway claimed that the visit wasn’t a political stunt but instead she called it “presidential” and “a decidedly nonpolitical event, no press allowed, going to help people on the ground who are in need.” And that’s how you know is DEFINITELY a political stunt. Donald Trump and Mike Pence do not need to visit the state in order to help the people, they just need to donate money. By visiting they are just pulling first responders, like police officers, away from helping flood victims to secure wherever he is going to be. Even one officer being diverted is one officer too many. This is exactly the reason why the governor has asked President Obama to hold off on visiting.
On Thursday evening Governor Edwards appeared on Rachel Maddow’s show and said:
The president is welcome anytime he wants to come…In all honesty, he was gonna visit I would just assume it’d be a week or ten days, fourteen days from now because the vice president was here about three weeks ago to a memorial service for the victims of the police officers who were killed here and I will tell you it is a major ordeal. They free up the interstate for them, we have to take hundreds of local first responders, police officers, sheriff’s deputies and state troopers to provide security for that type of visit. I would just as soon have those people engaged in the response rather than trying to secure the president. So I’ve asked him to wait, if he would, another couple of weeks.
Unlike President Obama, Donald Trump and Mike Pence give zero fucks that those first responders have now been taken off the response to flood and asked to babysit them. Yep, that’s really “presidential.” Uh-huh.
Source: Winning Democrats