TAMPA, Fla. — When President Biden travels to southwest Florida on Wednesday, he will see the devastation of Hurricane Ian, one of the deadliest storms in the state’s history, and meet with people whose homes and livelihoods disappeared last week in a rush of wind and water.
With damage most likely in the tens of billions of dollars and a rising death toll, the scale of loss has been enough to pause the unrelenting bluster of politics: Mr. Biden has promised to put differences aside when he meets with Gov. Ron DeSantis, a Republican and a frequent sparring partner, for a briefing later in the day.
“There will be plenty of time to discuss differences between the president and the governor, but now is not the time,” Karine Jean-Pierre, the White House press secretary, told reporters on Tuesday. “As you’ve heard from the president, he has said when it comes to delivering and making sure that the people of Florida have what they need, especially after Hurricane Ian, we are one. We are working as one.”
It is unclear whether their delicate détente will hold longer than Mr. Biden’s four hours on the ground.
While Mr. Biden views former President Donald J. Trump as a threat to democracy, he speaks of Mr. DeSantis, 44, as an emerging force in a party he says he no longer recognizes.
“This is not your father’s Republican Party,” Mr. Biden said this spring, targeting Mr. DeSantis. “It’s not even conservative in a traditional sense of conservatism. It’s mean, it’s ugly.”
The governor is happy to play the part. A former congressman who is running for re-election against Charlie Crist, a centrist Democrat and former governor, Mr. DeSantis is interested in a run for the presidency in 2024. As governor, he has enacted several policies that Mr. Biden has assailed. The two have publicly tangled over everything from mask mandates for teachers during the coronavirus pandemic to the contents of mathematics textbooks. In February, Mr. DeSantis accused the president of being a “fella who just hates Florida.”
Mr. Biden, who has never been immune to provocation, has returned fire. When Mr. DeSantis’s government proudly flew exhausted and confused migrants, some of them children, to Martha’s Vineyard last month, the president called the stunt “reckless” and “un-American.”
It took Hurricane Ian to dial down the noise.
After the president and Jill Biden, the first lady, land at an airport in Fort Myers, Fla., on Wednesday — two days after visiting storm-battered Puerto Rico — they will board a helicopter and view the landscape by air. Fort Myers and other hard-hit cities, including Sanibel, Cape Coral and Fort Myers Beach, are in Lee County, where a majority of deaths from the storm have occurred. Mr. DeSantis has faced questions about why officials did not issue evacuation warnings in the county until the day before the storm hit — a day later than warnings in neighboring counties.
Mr. Biden will land near Fort Myers Beach, a laid-back strip of sand and road that attracts rowdy spring breakers and margarita-toting snowbirds. The town was all but leveled when Hurricane Ian, a Category 4 storm with winds up to 155 miles per hour, slammed into the coast.
Unusually warm waters off Florida’s southwest coast powered the storm as it made landfall north of Fort Myers, tossing motorboats like toys, pulverizing mobile homes and gutting beach resorts. (Mr. DeSantis and other Florida Republicans have remained hostile to the idea that climate change could be causing more powerful storms.)
The governor will be among the officials who will meet Mr. Biden around 2 p.m. on Wednesday at his destination, a wharf area near the island, for an operational briefing.
As federal relief funds have flowed unimpeded to his state since Hurricane Ian, Mr. DeSantis — who as a freshman congressman voted against a funding plan that would have helped victims of Hurricane Sandy in 2013 — has turned from a smirking bomb thrower to an agreeable partner. He has spoken several times by phone with Mr. Biden in recent days. He has also played nice on television, even with more flammable personalities like Tucker Carlson of Fox News.
“But you know, when people are fighting for their lives, when their whole livelihood is at stake, when they’ve lost everything, if you can’t put politics aside for that, then you’re just not going to be able to,” Mr. DeSantis told Mr. Carlson last week. (To be sure, Mr. DeSantis has not totally divorced himself from his politics: In recent days, he has warned looters that Florida is a “Second Amendment state.”)
Either way, the president has carefully returned the volleys. When Mr. Biden received a briefing on the storm at the Federal Emergency Management Agency headquarters in Washington on Thursday, he told reporters that he and Mr. DeSantis had spoken several times.
“He complimented me,” Mr. Biden said. “He thanked me for the immediate response we had. He told me how much he appreciated it. He said he was extremely happy with what was going on.”
“This is not about anything having to do with our disagreements politically,” the president added. “This is about saving people’s homes, lives and businesses.”
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Biden and DeSantis Pledge Lasting Support to Rebuild Florida - The New York Times
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