CNN
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A spokesperson for Gov. Ron DeSantis said Friday that there are no plans for the Republican to meet with President Joe Biden when he travels to Florida on Saturday, contradicting comments Biden made earlier in the day indicating they would.
“We don’t have any plans for the Governor to meet with the President tomorrow,” DeSantis spokesperson Jeremy Redfern told CNN Friday. “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.”
Biden had told CNN earlier Friday that “yes,” he did plan to meet with the Florida governor while surveying damage from Hurricane Idalia in the state over the weekend.
CNN has asked the White House and DeSantis’ office for an explanation of the discrepancy.
The conflicting statements between Biden and DeSantis’s team represent the most public sign of discord between the two men in the wake of Idalia. Both leaders had attempted to emphasize in their public statements that they were working together to respond to the hurricane and portrayed their work as being above politics in a time of crisis. Biden and DeSantis had largely worked in harmony multiple times in the last couple years to respond to the condo collapse in Surfside in 2021 and Hurricane Ian in 2022.
But the two men are far from friends. DeSantis is running to oust Biden from the White House in 2024 and both men have not shied away from intensely criticizing each other in the moments when they haven’t been brought together by disaster.
Presidential trips to disaster zones are usually tightly coordinated with local and state leaders so as to not interrupt the response and recovery, making the contretemps between the White House and governor’s mansion all the more notable. For instance, Biden waited to fly to Maui until Hawaii Gov. Josh Green told him that a trip to view damage from wildfires would not take away from recovery efforts .
The president frequently says he wants to wait to visit an area affected by a disaster so his presence – and the massive security apparatus that comes with it – doesn’t affect the work of first responders. However, the president has a more compressed schedule than usual over the next week and a half as he is set to travel to the G-20 in New Delhi, India, at the end of next week and is not likely to be back in the US until the second week of September.
The White House had been vague about whether Biden and DeSantis would meet ahead of the president’s comment on Friday. On Thursday, Biden’s homeland security adviser Liz Sherwood-Randall told reporters during a White House press briefing that the trip was still being planned, but that “every time I’ve been to Florida with the president, he has met – of course – with Gov. DeSantis and traveled the disaster zone, whether it’s from last year’s hurricane or when the Surfside condominium building collapsed.”
In a statement Friday, White House spokesperson Emilie Simons told CNN Biden’s visit was being planned to disrupt the recovery efforts from the storm as little as possible. Idalia made landfall early Wednesday morning.
“President Biden and the First Lady look forward to meeting members of the community impacted by Hurricane Idalia and surveying impacts of the storm,” Simons said. “They will be joined by Administrator (Deanne) Criswell who is overseeing the federal response. Their visit to Florida has been planned in close coordination with FEMA as well as state and local leaders to ensure there is no impact on response operations.”
DeSantis told reporters earlier in the day that he had spoke with Biden over the phone and raised concerns about pulling resources away from the recovery efforts to provide security for the visit, especially since it will take place in a part of the state where access was already limited before Idalia arrived.
“The hardest hit communities, it would be very disruptive to have the whole kind of security apparatus that goes, because there’s only so many ways to get into these places,” DeSantis said at a briefing in Tallahassee. “And so what we want to do is make sure that the power restoration continues, that the relief efforts continue, and that we don’t have any interruption in that.”
But a White House official told CNN on Friday that DeSantis did not raise those concerns with Biden when he told the governor of his trip before announcing it at FEMA headquarters.
This story has been updated with additional details.
