President Joe Biden is in Florida today to inspect the damage from Hurricane Idalia. The White House offered to have a meeting with Gov. Ron DeSantis, but DeSantis declined. Idalia made landfall Wednesday morning along Florida’s sparsely populated Big Bend region, causing widespread flooding and damage.
Governors typically meet with visiting presidents after natural disasters in order to coordinate federal aid to the state. However, a DeSantis spokesman didn’t think the state was prepared to make security preparations for a presidential visit.
In response to DeSantis eventually preemptively calling off a meeting, White House spokeswoman Emilie Simons said, “President Biden and the first lady look forward to meeting members of the community impacted by Hurricane Idalia and surveying impacts of the storm. Their visit to Florida has been planned in close coordination” with Federal Emergency Management personnel “as well as state and local leaders to ensure there is no impact on response operations.”
The political disconnect between both sides is a break from the recent past, since Biden and DeSantis met when the president toured Florida after Hurricane Ian hit the state last year, and following the Surfside condo collapse in Miami Beach in summer 2021. But DeSantis is now running for president and only stopped campaigning when landfall was imminent.
Political commentators have suggested that DeSantis’ refusal to meet with Biden is in response to Republican reaction to New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie’s embrace of then-President Barack Obama during a tour of damage from Hurricane Sandy in 2012. DeSantis’ fragile hopes of beating Donald Trump in the Republican primaries may not survive partisan response to such a meeting from the base of the party.
“There’s a time and a place to have political season,” the governor said before Idalia made landfall. “But then there’s a time and a place to say that this is something that’s life-threatening, this is something that could potentially cost somebody their life, it could cost them their livelihood.”
As Biden seeks reelection, the White House has asked for an additional $4 billion to address natural disasters as part of its supplemental funding request to Congress. That would bring the total to $16 billion and highlight that wildfires, flooding, and hurricanes have intensified during a period of climate change, imposing ever-higher costs on U.S. taxpayers.
