Ron DeSantis Has No Plans to Meet with Joe Biden During Hurricane Idalia Tour

President Joe Biden is traveling to Florida on Saturday to tour the state in the wake of Hurricane Idalia, a Category 3 storm that pummeled parts of Florida’s west coast last week. But he won’t be meeting with the state’s governor and 2024 White House hopeful, Ron DeSantis.

The GOP presidential hopeful told Biden over the phone on Friday that “it would be very disruptive to have the whole security apparatus” that accompanies the president “because there are only so many ways to get into” many of the hardest hit areas.

“We don’t have any plans for the governor to meet with the president,” DeSantis spokesman Jeremy Redfern confirmed in a statement Friday evening. “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.”

DeSantis’s comments came just hours after Biden said he planned to meet with the governor. An anonymous White House official told Politico that DeSantis “did not express concerns” on Thursday when the president informed him of his impending visit. That day, Biden joked that he’d communicated so much with the Florida governor over the hurricane that “there should be a direct dial” between the two of them. “I think [DeSantis] trusts my judgment and my desire to help, and I trust him to be able to suggest that this is not about politics, this is about taking care of the people of his state,” Biden said earlier in the week.

The Sunshine State’s governor had suggested as much on Wednesday. “We have to deal with supporting the needs of the people who are in harm’s way or have difficulties,” DeSantis said. “And that has got to triumph over any type of short-term political calculation or any type of positioning. This is the real deal. You have people’s lives that have been at risk.”

The apparent rebuffing is an abrupt shift from recent years, when DeSantis and Biden appeared together multiple times following disasters. They met during the president’s tour of Florida following Hurricane Ian last year, and after the Surfside condo collapse in 2021, which left 98 people dead. Homeland Security adviser Liz Sherwood-Randall pointed to these experiences earlier last week, arguing that Biden and DeSantis “are very collegial when we have the work to do together of helping Americans in need, citizens of Florida in need.”

But now DeSantis is running to hopefully challenge Biden in the presidential election, and has vowed to “send Joe Biden back to his basement in Delaware where he belongs.” The Biden campaign has shot back of late: a recent campaign email charged DeSantis with overseeing an “inflation hot spot” and supporting an “extreme MAGA blueprint to undermine democracy.” A meeting this weekend would have been the pair’s first joint event since DeSantis announced his presidential bid in late May.

In a statement, White House spokeswoman Emilie Simons said, “President Biden and the first lady look forward to meeting members of the community impacted by Hurricane Idalia and surveying impacts of the storm.” She added that their visit has “been planned in close coordination” with Federal Emergency Management personnel “as well as state and local leaders to ensure there is no impact on response operations.”

Nikki Fried, chair of the Florida Democratic Party, accused DeSantis of “always put[ting] politics over people.” “In times of crisis, the American people expect our leaders to put aside their differences and find strength in unity,” she said in a statement.