Neil Cavuto, a Fox News host who has emerged as an unlikely Trump skeptic on the typically right-leaning cable news channel, spoke with Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg about misinformation surrounding the ongoing federal hurricane response in Florida—at one point directly calling out claims made by former President Donald Trump.
In the interview on Thursday afternoon, Buttigieg mostly discussed the details about the ongoing responses to Helene and Milton, which struck Florida as a Category 3 hurricane last night. He heaped praise on the response from Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and the state’s Department of Transportation.
“For the most part, we’ve seen a lot of responsible actors on both sides of the aisle,” Buttigieg said, and said he has been communicating with Republican legislators in recent days, including Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida and Sen. Tim Scott of South Carolina.
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“You would never know from the conversations we’re having which one was a Republican and which one was a Democrat,” Buttigieg said. “Right now you have a lot of people pulling together, working to get the job done for people, regardless of how you voted.”
“We also get a lot of misinformation, don’t we,” Cavuto told the transportation secretary. “We have people who say in North Carolina—if you’re a Republican, you’re not going to get help. If you’re a Democrat, you’re going to get help. I would imagine that does a huge disservice to people working together and scares the bejesus out of others when they believe it.”
Buttigieg agreed, and cited the false claim that the $750 grants given to survivors of Helene were conditional or a hard limit to aid. This claim was widely debunked, including by FEMA themselves.
Wind gusts pull down utility polls in Fort Myers, Florida as Hurricane Milton approaches.
Ricardo Arduengo/Reuters“Donald Trump said that about North Carolina—Republicans not getting help, but Democrats getting help. That was Donald Trump,” Cavuto said.
In a post on his Truth Social app on September 30, four days after Hurricane Helene made landfall, Trump wrote about his plans to visit the devastated Appalachian region of North Carolina.
“I’ll be there shortly, but don’t like the reports that I’m getting about the Federal Government, and the Democrat Governor of the State, going out of their way to not help people in Republican areas.”
“I think that’s really unfortunate, because it’s just not true,” Buttigieg replied. “We’ve got thousands of people in all of the areas that have been affected, and that’s just the federal response alone.”
The aftermath of Hurricane Milton in Orlando, Florida.
Jose Luis Gonzalez/ReutersButtigieg said first responders are not “checking whether you are in a red county or a blue county, they’re checking what’s going on with the bridges, and who needs comms help, and what the immediate needs are and how we can be helpful.”
“It’s a way for people to get cash they desperately need, it’s not the only money they will ever get or hope to get,” Cavuto said at the end of the segment. “But that kind of misinformation gets out there, whether it’s perpetrated by a politician or someone you think is someone of note and authority, it is wrong. It is bull. And it cannot be tolerated.”
A crane smashed through the offices of the Tampa Bay Times in St. Petersburg, Florida as Hurricane Milton passed over the city.
Marco Bello/ReutersCavuto’s statements stand in stark contrast to the other hosts on the channel, who seemed to move in lock-step with the former president’s talking points—albeit seemingly avoiding the more outlandish claim that the feds were not helping “Republican areas” of North Carolina.
Trump and several of his allies in Congress have now fixated on the idea that the Biden administration, or Vice President Kamala Harris in her role as “border czar,” has diverted money away from FEMA to migrant relief on the southern border.
This claim has since been widely debunked—the money used to fund rescue efforts comes from the Disaster Relief Fund, which has not been diverted to “non-disaster related efforts,” FEMA confirmed.
Despite this, several Fox hosts on the network repeated the claim on air on Thursday in the aftermath of Hurricane Milton, according to a report from liberal watchdog group Media Matters for America.
At least some Republicans have backed away from these claims. In a long press release on Tuesday, Rep. Chuck Edwards, a Republican who represents the westernmost portion of North Carolina—including the devastated city of Asheville—circulated a memo debunking many of the claims circulating around the Helene cleanup. These included the $750 FEMA payments, as well as the claim that FEMA ran out of money or “diverted” funds to migrants or foreign aid.
“FEMA’s non-disaster related presence at the border has always been of major concern to me, even before Hurricane Helene, and I will continue to condemn their deployment of personnel to the southern border, but we must separate the two issues,” Todd said.
