02 September 2023 , 21:30
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Governor Ron DeSantis announced that he will not meet with President Joe Biden today, as the leader of the country travelled to visit Florida in the aftermath of Hurricane Idalia.
“In these rural communities, and so soon after impact, the security preparations alone that would go into setting up such a meeting would shut down ongoing recovery efforts,” DeSantis spokesman Jeremy Redfern said in a statement.
Idalia made landfall Wednesday morning along Florida’s Big Bend region as a Category 3 storm, causing widespread flooding and damage before moving north to drench Georgia and the Carolinas. Biden is set to fly to Florida on Saturday to tour the damage personally.
President Joe Biden takes a photo with Anna Prizzia, Alachua County Chair, after arriving at Gainesville Regional Airport (AP)Relief and restoration efforts are ongoing in Florida after Hurricane Idalia ravaged the state by making a catastrophic landfall just days ago. In the latest update, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis outlined how the power restoration will take place in the state after hundreds of thousands of people were impacted by power outages caused by disastrous wind gusts and precipitation. At present, 91,000 people remain without power, he said.
DeSantis preemptively heading off a meeting contradicts Biden himself, who, when asked after an event at the White House earlier Friday whether he would meet with DeSantis during his trip to Florida, replied, “Yes.”
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The remains of a destroyed building are seen in Horseshoe Beach (AP)It’s also 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 the summer of 2021.
But DeSantis is now running for president, and he only left the Republican primary trail last week with Idalia barreling toward his state. White House spokeswoman Emilie Simons responded, “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 the Federal Emergency Management Agency “as well as state and local leaders to ensure there is no impact on response operations,” Simons said in her own statement.
US President Joe Biden boards Marine One on arrival at Gainesville Regional Airport in Gainesville (AFP via Getty Images)“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.”
By Friday, the governor was telling reporters of Biden, “one thing I did mention to him on the phone” was “it would be very disruptive to have the whole security apparatus that goes” with the president “because there are only so many ways to get into” many of the hardest hit areas.
Florida Governor Ron DeSantis refused to meet Biden (CRISTOBAL HERRERA-ULASHKEVICH/EPA-EFE/REX/Shutterstock)“What we want to do is make sure that the power restoration continues and the relief efforts continue and we don’t have any interruption in that,” DeSantis said. The statement about not planning to meet came later, and Redfern pointed to the governor’s previous comments when asked how Idalia’s aftermath might differ from that of Ian or the Surfside collapse when DeSantis and Biden met.