NASHVILLE, Tenn. (AP) — President Donald Trump will visit disaster areas in Tennessee on Friday, just days after tornadoes that whipped across the state left 24 dead and many more injured.
Trump stepped off Air Force One and greeted Gov. Bill Lee shortly after 10 a.m.
Trump will be joined by Gov. Bill Lee, U.S. Sen. Marsha Blackburn and other top officials during his visit.
According to the White House, Trump has pledged federal assistance to help Tennessee recover from the tornadoes.
The first tornado began early Tuesday morning, creating a more than 50-mile (80-kilometer) trail of destruction well after midnight. A second tornado then exploded through communities farther east of Nashville, resulting in most of the deaths.
The National Weather Service said that was an EF-4 tornado, categorized as “extreme,” with winds between 166 and 200 mph. Local officials have said it was on the ground for about 2 miles.
Trump said the Tennessee tornadoes were “horrible” and “vicious.”
“Our hearts are full of sorrow for the lives that were lost,” he told a meeting of county officials from across the U.S. earlier this week. “Those tornadoes — I’ve seen many of them during a three-year period, and I’ve gotten to see the results. And they are vicious if you’re in their path.”
The Republican president won the heavily GOP state by 26 percentage points in the 2016 presidential election, and trounced Democrat Hillary Clinton in Putnam County by a margin of more than 2-to-1. Davidson County, the other Tennessee region devastated by tornadoes, is a Democratic enclave in the reliably Republican red state.
The White House hasn’t specified exactly where Trump will visit.
Trump was ending the day at his private Mar-a-Lago club in Palm Beach, Florida, attending a pair of fundraising events to benefit the Republican Party and his reelection campaign.
