US President Donald Trump visited disaster zones in North Carolina and California on Friday, using the first trip since his return to office to turn emergency aid into a political cudgel.
Trump said he would sign an order that could scrap the federal disaster agency, stepping up his effort to exert presidential power over the levers of government and to decide which states get money from Washington.
The Republican billionaire also threatened to withhold funding for Democratic-led California - a long-term target of his ire - to deal with devastating wildfires if it does not follow his orders.
But faced with the destruction left by terrifying fires that ravaged California, Trump was emollient, pledging the "federal government (is) standing behind you. 100 percent."
"I don't think you can realize how rough it is, how devastating it is, until you see it," he said after flying over the damaged areas.
"I mean, I saw a lot of bad things on television, but the extent of it, the size of it... it is devastation. It's incredible. It's really an incineration."
Trump's comments came after he threatened to withhold assistance if California does not change laws which he says allow undocumented migrants to vote - and linked that to a false claim that the state could solve its drought by simply opening a valve.
"In California I have a condition," he said. "I want two things, I want voter ID for the people of California... and I want to see the water be released and come down."
In Los Angeles a briefing with politicians and firefighters that began with empathy quickly derailed as Trump began claiming California had an "unlimited" supply of water.
He then embarked on an extended complaint about the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA).
"FEMA is incompetently run, and it costs about three times more than it should cost," he said.
Speaking in North Carolina earlier, where floods caused by Hurricane Helene last year killed more than 100 people in the state, he said that FEMA had "really let us down."
Trump said he would sign an executive order to overhaul or even get rid of FEMA.
"We're going to recommend that FEMA go away," he said.
With Mandel Ngan and Danny Kemp (Washington) / AFP
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