Trump heads to Texas as recovery efforts from deadly flood continue

President Donald Trump and first lady Melania Trump will travel to Texas on Friday to meet with first responders and grieving families in the aftermath of last week’s catastrophic flooding that has left more than 100 people dead.

During his visit, Trump is expected to receive a briefing from local elected officials and meet with victims’ relatives. He will be joined by Texas Gov. Greg Abbott.

Republican Sens. Ted Cruz and John Cornyn told reporters this week that they planned to travel with Trump to tour the flood damage. It is unclear whether state Attorney General Ken Paxton, a staunch ally of the administration who is challenging Cornyn in next year’s GOP primary, will join them.

Authorities continue to search miles of the Guadalupe River for more than 150 people who remain missing as hopes of finding more survivors dwindle. Among those confirmed or feared dead are 27 children and counselors at Camp Mystic, a Christian summer camp in Hunt.

Trump on Sunday signed a major disaster declaration for Texas to make federal funding available for hard-hit Kerr County, where nearly 77% of voters backed him in the 2024 election.

The trip to Texas will be Trump’s second to the site of a natural disaster since he was inaugurated for his second term; he visited Los Angeles in January after a wildfire devastated large swaths of Southern California. During his first term, he made multiple trips to Texas in 2017 in the aftermath of Hurricane Harvey and its deadly floods. The same year, he traveled to Puerto Rico to survey damage caused by Hurricane Maria.

The Trump administration has faced criticism from officials and lawmakers at various levels of government who have argued that recent job cuts at the National Weather Service and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, alongside plans to shutter the Federal Emergency Management Agency, prevented accurate forecasting and worsened the effects of the floods. Administration officials have repeatedly rejected those assertions.

Trump has pledged to “get rid” of FEMA, which is part of the Department of Homeland Security, and his administration has overseen a largely voluntary exodus of experienced personnel at the agency, fueling concerns about its ability to promptly respond to disasters. The concerns were heightened by a new policy from Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem mandating her approval for any agency spending in excess of $100,000.

Asked by NBC News on Thursday whether the new policy delayed FEMA’s response to the tragedy in Texas, Trump defended Noem.

“We were right on time. We were there — in fact, she was the first one I saw on television,” Trump told “Meet the Press” moderator Kristen Welker in a phone call. “She was there right from the beginning.”

Criticism of the disaster response has also focused on Kerr County’s emergency management system after reports indicated local officials did not use warnings from FEMA to send text alerts when the severity and speed of the flooding heightened, catching hundreds of people in a region known as “flash flood alley” by surprise. In addition, Kerr County, which has a population of more than 50,000 people, had no siren system to alert residents, in part because some local officials felt it was too expensive to install.

Trump called for additional flood alarms in Texas on Thursday, though he argued that the storm was unprecedented and that “nobody ever saw a thing like this coming.”

“After having seen this horrible event, I would imagine you’d put alarms up in some form, where alarms would go up if they see any large amounts of water or whatever it is,” he told NBC News.

Joe Herring, the mayor of Kerrville, told MSNBC’s Katy Tur this week that the state rejected an effort to install a siren system nearly a decade ago.

“The county government looked into that in 2017, and from what I heard, their grant application was denied,” Herring said. “I wasn’t in government at that time, but it sounds like we talked about it, we asked for help, and we were denied before.”