Trump visits Texas flood zone, defends government’s disaster response

President Donald Trump supported the local and national response to the catastrophic flash flooding in Texas on Friday while touring the affected Hill Country area, where a week earlier, at least 120 individuals, including many children, lost their lives.

In a roundtable discussion following a tour of Kerr County, the center of the disaster, Trump commended Texas Governor Greg Abbott and Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem for their efforts, stating they both performed an “incredible job.” The Trump administration, along with state and local leaders, has encountered increasing scrutiny regarding whether additional measures could have been taken to safeguard and alert residents before the flooding, which hit with remarkable swiftness in the early morning of July 4, the U.S. Independence Day.

Trump responded angrily when a reporter mentioned that some families impacted by the floods felt annoyed that warnings were not issued earlier. Some opponents have raised doubts about whether the administration’s budget reductions at the National Weather Service and the Federal Emergency Management Agency, which oversees the government’s disaster response efforts, could have worsened the disaster.

Trump officials claimed that the reductions did not affect the NWS’s capacity to predict storms, even with some local office vacancies. However, the president has mostly avoided addressing inquiries regarding his intentions to reduce or eliminate FEMA and transfer many of its essential responsibilities to state and local authorities.

“I’ll share it another time,” Trump stated on Tuesday when a reporter inquired about FEMA. Prior to the latest flooding, Kerr County opted against implementing an early-warning system due to unsuccessful attempts to obtain state funding for the expenses.

Lawrence Walker, 67, a resident of Kerrville for nearly thirty years, stated that both the county and state have insufficiently invested in disaster prevention, such as an early-warning system.

The Texas state legislature will convene in a special session later this month to investigate the flooding and provide disaster relief funding. Abbott has dismissed questions about whether anyone was to blame, calling that the “word choice of losers.”

Search teams in central Texas continued to search through debris for dozens still missing after devastating floods on July 4, which left 67 adults and 36 children dead, many from Camp Mystic. Despite heavy rains causing rapid river rises, opinions on the response varied. Local residents expressed concern about building near the flood-prone river, while some criticized recent funding cuts linked to the president’s legislative package.