In storm-ravaged North Carolina, people see that Trump is not describing reality. What about the rest of the nation?

HENDERSONVILLE, N.C. — Four weeks ago, a devastating storm here brought out the best in humanity. This week, Donald Trump came here to stoke the worst.

The flooding from Hurricane Helene wiped out entire swaths of their communities. But it also brought the people of western North Carolina together in their shared love of their mountain home. Neighbors helped neighbors. Political differences, for the moment, were forgotten. And an army of local volunteers pitched in to support a massive relief effort by federal, state and county governments and charities that has won almost uniform praise.

“This is the most community we’ve felt since moving here,” Zac Johnson, a Trump voter and Connecticut transplant, told me when I met him at the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s disaster recovery center. “They got everything up and running quicker than I expected.”

But as I spoke with Johnson, Trump was about 30 miles up the road, in Swannanoa, dividing the community with lies and exploiting the disaster for his own benefit. He declared at a campaign event that the federal “rescue effort was almost nonexistent,” that FEMA “has done a very poor job,” that people are feeling “abandoned” by the federal government and (Democratic) governor. “They don’t have any money,” he said of FEMA, because “they’ve spent it on illegal migrants. Many of them are murderers.” All false — as were Trump’s previous claims that President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris “didn’t send anything or anyone at all,” that they were “going out of their way to not help people in the Republican areas,” that survivors who lost everything would get no more than $750 from the government and that Democratic officials were “blocking people and money from coming into North Carolina to help.”

He called to the microphone a local businessman who offered a prayer — not for those who lost loved ones, homes or livelihoods but for Trump. “Father, I thank you for this man,” he preached, with hand on Trump’s shoulder, adding, “And I pray that you would anoint him.”

Trump’s lies about the storm response may work for him elsewhere in the country, where people don’t know any better. But here in the mountains, people see with their own eyes that what he’s saying is bunk.

“Some people who aren’t here may think that,” Rich DeMatteo said of the claim that storm survivors have been “abandoned” by the government. But on the ground here, “you see all the stuff they’re doing. It’s just a huge effort.”

DeMatteo identified himself as a Trump supporter, and the design on his T-shirt was of AR-style rifles forming the stripes on an American flag. But he said that “this isn’t a time for partisan politics.” His home and cars were swept away in a mudslide. He was in an emergency shelter for two weeks, and now FEMA is putting his family up in a hotel. At the shelter, he helped unload trucks and helicopters full of relief supplies brought in hourly by the National Guard. “They’re doing the best they can do,” he said.

It’s encouraging that, here in storm-ravaged North Carolina, people can separate reality from the things Trump is saying.

Can the rest of the nation? We’ll find out in 11 days. On Election Day, we’ll see whether, after nine years of Trump’s daily assaults on reality, the truth still has any relevance.

Americans can see in their own lives that the economy hasn’t collapsed; the price of bacon hasn’t quintupled; that all of the 15 million jobs created during the Biden administration didn’t go to undocumented immigrants; that violent migrants aren’t taking over the country; that crime isn’t rising; that the military hasn’t become a soft, “woke” assemblage of drag queens; that those who sacked the Capitol in 2021 weren’t peaceful; and that the government hasn’t cruelly abandoned those whose lives were upended by natural disasters. Americans can hear the urgent warning from retired Marine Gen. John Kelly and other former Trump administration officials that their old boss threatens our democratic way of life. But will any of it matter?

Here in western North Carolina, I heard the usual quibbles about paperwork and bureaucratic hurdles to accessing government disaster aid. But mostly I heard awe about the scale of the recovery effort and pride in the community. “I’d give this an A-plus and then some,” an 83-year-old woman who identified herself as a Trump voter told me in Asheville. “It touches my heart so much. These are the kind of people you want to live around.”

At the Hendersonville recovery center, the parking lot was jammed and hundreds of people were coming to meet with officials from FEMA, the Small Business Administration, the National Flood Insurance Program, North Carolina’s Emergency Management agency and the Disaster Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program. Outside, residents told me what they had seen.

“We had Chinook helicopters overhead, four at a time,” Valerie Blaser reported.

“All you see are trucks,” Joanne Cangialosi added. “They’re rebuilding roads, rebuilding the whole electric grid.” While outsiders made “fake news” attacks on the government response, she said among local residents, “it’s like politics got pushed aside.” “During this, we didn’t think about politics.”

Retiree Stephanie Koulet, likewise, had heard all the disinformation about federal aid being capped at $750, about FEMA refusing to assist people in Republican areas, about relief agencies forcing people to vote for Kamala Harris, even about the feds somehow engineering the hurricane itself. But she was impressed by the “tenderness” and the “energy” of the government aid workers — “so much so that I’m thinking about becoming a FEMA worker.”

Visiting the recovery center, Henderson County Manager John Mitchell told me the county, heavily Republican, has found “nothing but friends” in the federal and state governments.

The destruction I saw in Hendersonville and in nearby Asheville and Swannanoa is overwhelming: wrecked cars and pieces of buildings in the rivers, uprooted trees lining the roads, vast fields of caked mud, homes and businesses collapsed and dismembered, massive piles of debris, and much of the area still without potable water.

But the progress has been impressive. Of 1,200 roads made impassable by the storm, 789 have reopened. Among the 1 million homes and businesses that lost power, all but 5,000 have had it restored. Ninety-four percent of telecommunications infrastructure is back online. Using more than 30 aircraft and 1,200 vehicles, the state and federal governments have delivered more than 27 million pounds of food, water and medicine. The troop presence has exceeded 3,100, and the National Guard, the Army’s 101st Airborne and others have flown more than 1,200 flight hours. Twenty-eight of 35 school districts have reopened.

FEMA has already spent $1.4 billion in North Carolina and has 1,500 staff on the ground, signing up 207,000 people for assistance, providing housing to 6,200 and coordinating the response among 15 federal agencies, state and local governments and charities. More than 5,000 small businesses have registered for SBA loans.

FEMA temporarily shut down some work last week after unsubstantiated reports that “trucks of armed militia” were hunting FEMA employees. One man was arrested for threatening FEMA workers after bringing his gun to a FEMA site; he said he had been motivated by claims that FEMA was withholding aid to survivors here. Federal workers have also endured some verbal harassment.

But FEMA Administrator Deanne Criswell said the large number of people registering for aid shows that the locals generally aren’t buying Trump’s attacks on FEMA. “What I see on the ground is unity, people that understand what we’re doing,” she told me on a stop at the Hendersonville site. The disinformation, she said, is “on the periphery, from people that aren’t in the community.”

As Criswell toured the facility, a woman named Sheila, who lost her home in the storm, snapped at her to sit down and start signing people up herself to reduce the wait time. A few minutes later, she came over and hugged Criswell to apologize for being “grouchy.”

“You’re going through a lot,” Criswell told her. “I get it.”

The morning of Trump’s visit this week, Gov. Roy Cooper (D) held a news conference in Asheville arguing that Trump’s “lies” were discouraging people from seeking help and demoralizing troops and other aid workers.

Trump responded with a campaign event in Swannanoa, a Republican stronghold, along a commercial stretch that had been wiped out. Against a backdrop of destruction, he repeated his bogus claims about the 2020 election being stolen from him. He said that the high early voting in the area (76 of 80 early-voting sites in the storm-hit counties were open as planned) was good news — for him: “Not to get too political, but they tend to be very Trump areas, and that the people would come out like that, I think it’s a great sign.” He also boasted about the help he had provided to hurricane survivors through a GoFundMe campaign that has raised nearly $8 million. (If so, that amounts to 0.16 percent of what FEMA has spent so far.)

Trump couldn’t deny that progress had been made here, but he attributed that to private citizens “from all over the country,” not to the “very bad” FEMA response. “In North Carolina’s hour of desperation, the American people answered the call much more so than your federal government,” he said. This echoed fictitious claims by Mark Robinson, the GOP gubernatorial nominee in North Carolina, who said that “virtually every single aircraft” in the relief effort is “privately owned.”

In reality, the largest of the private relief efforts, run by a group called Savage Freedoms, told me it has delivered between 700,000 and 1 million pounds of relief supplies. That’s impressive and admirable, but it pales in comparison with the 27 million pounds by the state and federal governments. And the private operation uses personnel on loan from the 101st Airborne.

A reporter asked Trump whether it’s “helping the recovery effort in North Carolina to keep making these claims that FEMA’s not doing their job.”

Trump responded: “If they’re doing a poor job, we’re supposed to not say it?” He said those speaking at the campaign event with him “are entitled to say it, and these are honest people.”

But that’s not what they were saying. Rep. Chuck Edwards (R-North Carolina.), standing with Trump at the event, had put out a statement debunking the many false claims about FEMA, including those Trump had made about it diverting disaster funds and capping benefits at $750. Later, I spoke with another of those who had been standing with Trump, Adam Smith, a former Green Beret who runs the Savage Freedoms airlift operation. He said FEMA in general is too bureaucratic and slow but the agency is working “exactly the way it’s supposed to work” and that FEMA workers here are “doing everything they can.”

A few blocks down Highway 70 from where Trump was lying to survivors, a Community Care Station, run by the county and coordinated by FEMA, was helping survivors. Trailers and water tankers provided by military contractor RTX offered a dozen showers, a dozen washers and dryers, and eight bathrooms. A tent offered vaccines. The Red Cross offered blankets and infant formula. A Mennonite congregation and a Christian charity offered food and clothing. A mental health counselor has been on-site — even a DJ.

There, I met Sheri Barker, a Swannanoa resident who was doing her laundry. I asked her about the hurricane recovery. She said there’s some “cognitive dissonance” among MAGA neighbors who feel duty-bound to echo Trump’s complaints about a paltry federal response even as they see — and benefit from — the robust assistance all around them.

“We’ve had an amazing community response,” she said. “The federal supplemented the local. It wasn’t Big Brother coming in to fix everything. It was finding out what we needed and supplementing it.” Barker volunteers at the library, which FEMA has been using to sign up residents for help. “They’ve been wonderful,” she said.

Of course, Trump, using the town’s destruction as a campaign backdrop down the road, ignored all that. “Our former president, standing in this space and telling those kind of lies?” Barker asked. “It’s bulls---. And you can quote me.”

Dana Milbank is an opinion columnist for The Washington Post. He sketches the foolish, the fallacious and the felonious in politics.