New Harris digital ad attacks Trump’s handling of natural disaster relief

By Alayna Treene, CNN

(CNN) — Vice President Kamala Harris’ campaign is launching a new digital ad campaign featuring two former Donald Trump administration officials criticizing the former president’s handling of natural disasters while in office.

The ad, titled “Withhold” and obtained first by CNN, is a response to Trump’s recent attacks on the federal response to Hurricane Helene, including his false claims that Harris spent “all her FEMA money” on housing “illegal migrants” and unsubstantiated claims that the Biden administration and Democratic leaders abandoned certain Republican communities in North Carolina out of partisan bias. The new ad comes as Hurricane Milton, a Category 5, is set to make landfall in Florida on Wednesday.

Olivia Troye, who served as an aide to former Vice President Mike Pence, and Kevin Carroll, a former Trump Homeland Security official, claim in the ad that Trump, while president, suggested wanting to withhold disaster relief funds from Democratic states.

“He would suggest not giving disaster relief to states that hadn’t voted for him,” Carroll says in the ad.

Troye says: “I remember one time after a wildfire in California, he wouldn’t send relief because it was a Democratic state. So we went as far as looking up how many votes he got in those impacted areas to show him, ‘These are people who voted for you.’ This isn’t normal.”

Both Carroll and Troye say in the ad that they plan to vote for Harris. Troye previously endorsed Harris and delivered a speech during the Democratic National Convention in which she sharply criticized Trump.

The Trump campaign did not respond to a request for comment.

The new ad campaign comes after Politico’s E&E News published a review last week of Trump’s record that it said showed Trump “was flagrantly partisan at times in response to disasters and on at least three occasions hesitated to give disaster aid to areas he considered politically hostile or ordered special treatment for pro-Trump states.”

The story cited interviews with Troye and Mark Harvey, Trump’s senior director for resilience policy on the National Security Council. Trump campaign spokesman Steven Cheung told CNN at the time: “None of this is true and is nothing more than a fabricated story from someone’s demented imagination.”

The Biden administration has been under scrutiny in the wake of Hurricane Helene, which ravaged parts of North Carolina and Georgia, with Trump and his campaign escalating their attacks on Harris in recent days over what they call an insufficient response to the recovery efforts. They’ve claimed the vice president is more focused on her presidential campaign than helping struggling Americans in the aftermath of the hurricane’s devastation.

Both Trump and Harris made visits to Georgia and North Carolina in recent days, where they were briefed by local officials.

Harris, addressing Trump’s criticism, told reporters on the tarmac at Joint Base Andrews on Monday: “There’s a lot of mis- and disinformation being pushed out there by the former president about what is available, in particular to the survivors of [Hurricane] Helene. And first of all, it’s extraordinarily irresponsible, it’s about him, it’s not about you.”

Harris also responded to reports of Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, a Republican, not taking her calls. (He said he had not been aware of the vice president’s reach outs.)

“People are in desperate need of support right now, and playing political games at this moment, in these crisis situations – these are the height of emergency situations – is just utterly irresponsible, and it is selfish, and it is about political gamesmanship instead of doing the job that you took an oath to do, which is putting the people first,” the vice president said on Monday.

The ad is part of the Harris-Walz campaign’s $370 million in digital and television advertising reservations between Labor Day and Election Day, the Harris campaign told CNN. The spot will begin airing Thursday evening on digital and social media across battleground states.

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