"So you saw coming in — out here on Treasure Island, the thing you notice more than anything is not necessarily that lines are down or that buildings are destroyed," DeSantis intoned. "There obviously has been damage, but you just see so much debris.
"Their homes got flooded, the businesses got flooded, and then the furniture, or they had to gut the drywall. All this stuff basically became trash."
It seems the trash arrayed behind him wasn't deposited there by Milton, however.
A clip that went viral on social media shows a crew assembling the small mountain of debris as if they were prepping a stage set for a production of Shakespeare's Tempest.
by Ron DeSantis to stage a hurricane recovery press conference by stacking actual garbage behind his podium, all while shaming other politicians for exploiting the disaster
byu/ExactlySorta intherewasanattempt
"Ron has no shame," Nikki Fried, chair of the Florida Democratic Party and former state agriculture commissioner, posted on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter. "He’s spent weeks accusing everyone else of politicizing this disaster while ordering workers to window-dress his press conference."
Another X user wondered whether DeSantis would don his infamous white rain boots in order to appear in full costume.
"Ron DeSantis is having people throw debris near his podium so he can cosplay like he’s in a disaster area?" the post reads. "Will he be showing up in his white rubber booties, too? Weak."
A Reddit user chimed in: "Bull crap, No stacking needed. There are miles of garbage already stacked for pickup. You clearly don’t know what a hurricane zone looks like."
Another wanted to know where DeSantis and crew sourced their debris: "Maybe he is remodeling his office."
The governor might have taken a page out of the playbook of former president Donald Trump, who built a wall of bricks in front of a hurricane-damaged furniture store in Valdosta, Georgia, last month.
Some speculated that DeSantis enlisted members of his private army, the Florida State Guard, to create his pile, the governor's communications director Bryan Griffin said the National Guard had collected the items as part of its recovery efforts.Trump went to do a photo op at Valdosta, Georgia where they still don’t have power and had to spot recovery efforts for his visit and built him a podium out of bricks from the building behind him smh 🙄 pic.twitter.com/Ide9YcS5Im
— Wu Tang is for the Children (@WUTangKids) September 30, 2024
"Debris was being added to the pile because that is an actual work site," Griffin insisted on X, poking back at Fried. "Those are FLNG deployed by the governor to help locals clean up debris, and we were there to announce state initiatives to help it move even quicker. It's chair of the @FlaDems who has no shame."
