“Now, if Michael loses, I’m not sending it, okay? No, I’m only kidding. You’re getting it.”
That was President Donald Trump on stage in Gastonia, North Carolina, on Wednesday, September 16, speaking at a rally for Republican Senate nominee Michael Whatley. The joke, if that is what it was, followed a boast of “more than $2 billion in FEMA funding” and a promise to Whatley, who was standing beside him, that more was coming for the parts of Western North Carolina still waiting.
The region heard something else. Helene took over 100 lives in North Carolina, and damage in the state is put at an estimated $60 billion. Governor Josh Stein, a Democrat, says federal aid has covered about 16% of that bill, and he has asked Washington for another $10 billion.
“Not a time for a joke”
Chris Cooper, a Western Carolina University professor of political science, told Blue Ridge Public Radio the remark would go over “not well at all” in the mountains. “This was not a time for a joke,” he said. Nobody who has lost a home or knows someone who has, he argued, is in a joking mood. He did not expect it to help Republicans at the polls or lift faith in government among residents there.
Stein called it “no way to respond to a tragic disaster, no way to run a country, no way to campaign for office.” Residents of the region have been frustrated for some time at the pace of federal help, and at protests in Asheville earlier in September residents demanded a bigger federal effort.
Senator Andy Kim of New Jersey, a Democrat, refused to accept the joking frame. “Trump isn’t joking,” he wrote on X, adding that Trump had treated New Jersey and other Democratic-led states the same way when they asked for help after the previous winter’s storms. Anderson Clayton, head of the state Democratic Party, said voters were owed an answer on whether Whatley sees Helene aid as something that “should be conditional on how North Carolinians vote in November.”
The Republican answer
The White House and the Whatley campaign took the same line. White House spokesperson Lauren Bis noted that Trump “said he was kidding” and that nobody in the country should lose disaster relief because of what they believe politically. DJ Griffin, for the Whatley campaign, called it a joke the president himself labeled as one. “What’s not a joke,” he went on, is that Trump, Senator Ted Budd, Representative Tim Moore and Whatley had together delivered $11 billion to the state, which he described as more federal relief than North Carolina has ever received after a natural disaster. Trump appointed Whatley to his FEMA Review Council soon after Helene.
The campaign of Roy Cooper replied that hurricane recovery “isn’t a joke” and that families still rebuilding “aren’t pawns in a revenge scheme.”
What it does to the race
The arithmetic of the contest is lopsided. A recent poll shows former governor Roy Cooper, the Democrat, with a double-digit lead over Whatley, the former Republican National Committee chairman.
State Representative Jennifer Balkcom, the Republican nominee in the 11th Congressional District, also appeared on stage with Trump. And the aid fight has a history: Attorney General Jeff Jackson and several of his counterparts won a suit in December 2025 over money that FEMA and its parent department had refused to release, funds earmarked for Helene recovery among other projects.
Sources
- Trump kids that he'll only send more FEMA funding to WNC if Whatley wins Senate race (BPR News via WUNC)
- Trump says he was only kidding after threatening Helene aid cut for NC (The News & Observer)
