DeSantis has no plans to meet with Biden when president visits Florida to survey Idalia damage
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis has no plans to meet with President Biden on Saturday when the commander in chief visits parts of the state most impacted by Hurricane Idalia.
“We don’t have any plans for the governor to meet with the president tomorrow,” DeSantis’ press secretary, Jeremy Redfern, said in a statement on 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,” he added.
DeSantis, 44, who is vying to challenge Biden, 80, in the 2024 presidential election, has been in frequent contact with the White House since the Category 3 storm made landfall on Florida’s Gulf Coast earlier this week — but the lack of planned face-to-face meeting between the two contradicts what the president told the media on Friday.
“Yes,” Biden responded when asked by a reporter if he planned to meet with DeSantis at some point during his Florida trip.
White House Homeland Security Adviser Elizabeth Sherwood-Randall also suggested on Friday that she expected a Biden-DeSantis meeting.
“We’re just planning the visit, but I will say 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,” Sherwood-Randall said.
“Often, they’ll meet, have a briefing from the emergency responders. It can be in the open, as it was from the hurricane last year. It could be in a briefing room, as it was at Surfside. They are very collegial when we have the work to do together of helping Americans in need, citizens of Florida in need,” she added.
DeSantis on Friday warned Biden that his planned visit to the Sunshine State could be “very disruptive” to ongoing recovery efforts.
“One thing I did mention to him on the phone is where these communities [are] — the hardest-hit communities — it would be very disruptive to have the whole security apparatus that goes because there are only so many ways to get into these places,” DeSantis told reporters during a briefing in Tallahassee.
Idalia’s fierce winds and torrential storm surge wreaked havoc on Florida’s Big Bend region Wednesday morning and have left hundreds of thousands of Floridians without power.
The governor said Friday that he expects all power to be restored to residents this weekend.
DeSantis has taken a break from the campaign trail to concentrate on recovery efforts in the Sunshine State. It’s unclear when the governor plans to resume his presidential primary campaign.
The White House did not immediately respond to The Post’s request for comment.