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President Donald Trump and first lady Melania Trump speak to reporters on the South Lawn of the White House before boarding Marine One en route to North Carolina and California. Alamy Stock Photo
FEMA
Trump says he will sign executive order 'maybe getting rid of' federal disaster relief agency
Trump is separately trying to leverage disaster aid over rival Democrats in California.
LAST UPDATE | 24 Jan 2025
US PRESIDENT DONALD Trump visited disaster zones in North Carolina and California today, using his first trip since his return to office to turn emergency aid into a political cudgel.
Trump said he would sign an order that could scrap the federal disaster agency, stepping up his effort to exert presidential power over the levers of government, and to decide which states get money from Washington.
The Republican billionaire also threatened to withhold funding for Democratic-led California – a long-term target of his ire – to deal with devastating wildfires if it does not follow his orders.
The visit came as the White House said that Trump’s promised operation to expel millions of undocumented immigrants had begun with the launch of deportation flights on military aircraft.
Speaking in North Carolina, where floods caused by Hurricane Helene last year killed more than 100 people, Trump said the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) had “really let us down.”
Trump said he would be “signing an executive order to begin the process of fundamentally reforming and overhauling FEMA, or maybe getting rid of FEMA.”
“We’re going to recommend that FEMA go away.”
‘Greatest president’
Trump met victims of the devastating floods, getting them to recount what they said were failings by federal agencies and insurance companies.
Trump is separately trying to leverage disaster aid over rival Democrats in California, even as fresh wildfires add to the toll of blazes that have killed some two dozen people and caused billions of dollars in damage.
He said he could withhold assistance if California does not change voting laws which he says allow undocumented immigrants to vote – and linked that to a false claim that the state could solve its drought by simply opening a valve.
“In California I have a condition,” he said. “I want two things, I want voter ID for the people of California… and I want to see the water be released and come down.”
“After that, I will be the greatest president that California has ever seen.”
Trump has previously slung insults at California’s Democratic Governor Gavin Newsom — branding him an “idiot” — and baselessly claimed that California authorities diverted water supplies to save a kind of small fish called a smelt.
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