President Donald Trump and the first lady Melania Trump will travel to Texas on Friday to meet with the lifeguards and families afflicted after the catastrophic floods last week that has left more than 100 dead people.
During your visit, Trump is expected to receive an informative session of local elected officials and meet with the relatives of the victims. Texas Greg Abbott governor will be joined.
The Republican sensor Ted Cruz and John Cornyn told journalists this week that they planned to travel with Trump to travel flood damage. It is not clear if state attorney general Ken Paxton, a firm ally of the administration that challenges Cornyn in the Republican primaries next year, will join them.
The authorities continue to look for miles from the Guadalupe River for more than 150 people who remain missing, since the hope of finding more survivors decreases. Among the dead or feared dead are 27 children and counselors in Camp Mystic, a Christian summer camp in Hunt.
Trump signed a great statement of disaster for Texas on Sunday to make federal funds available to Kerr County, where almost 77% of voters supported him in the 2024 elections.
The trip to Texas will be Trump’s second at the site of a natural disaster since he was inaugurated for his second term; He visited Los Angeles in January after a forest fire devastated great stripes in southern California. During his first term, he made multiple trips to Texas in 2017 after Hurricane Harvey and his mortal floods. The same year, he traveled to Puerto Rico to survey the damage caused by Hurricane Maria.
The Trump administration has faced criticism from officials and legislators at various levels of government who have argued that recent employment cuts in the National Meteorological Service and the Oceanic and Atmospheric National Administration, together with the plans to close the Federal Emergency Management Agency, avoided the precise prognosis and worsened the effects of floods. Administration officials have repeatedly rejected those statements.
Trump has pledged to “get rid” of FEMA, which is part of the National Security Department, and his administration has supervised an exodus voluntary of experienced personnel experienced in the agency, which drives concerns about his ability to respond quickly to disasters. The concerns were intensified by a new policy of the National Secretary of National Security Kristi Noem demanding its approval for any agency expense exceeding $ 100,000.
Asked by NBC News on Thursday if the new policy delayed FEMA’s response to the tragedy in Texas, Trump defended Noem.
“We arrived on time. We were there, in fact, she was the first one I saw on television,” Trump told the “Meet The Press” Kristen Welker in a phone call. “She was there from the beginning.”
Criticisms of the disaster response have also focused on the Kerr County Emergency Management System after the reports indicated that local officials did not use FEMA warnings to send text alerts when the gravity and speed of floods increased, catching hundreds of people in a region known as “Alley Flash Flow Alley” by surprise. In addition, Kerr County, which has a population of more than 50,000 people, did not have a siren system to alert residents, partly because some local officials felt that it was too expensive to install.
Trump asked for additional flood alarms in Texas on Thursday, although he argued that the storm had no precedents and that “nobody saw something like this come.”
“After having seen this horrible event, I imagine that you would put alarms in some way, where alarms would increase if they see any large amount of water or whatever,” he told NBC News.
Joe Herring, the mayor of Kerville, told Katy Tur of MSNBC this week that the state rejected an effort to install a siren system almost a decade ago.
“The county government investigated that in 2017, and from what I heard, its subsidy application was denied,” said Herring. “I was not in the government at that time, but we seem to talk about it, we asked for help and denied us before.”
