CHINA GROVE — United States Senate hopeful Michael Whatley stopped by the China Grove Family House on Saturday morning to meet with the local Republican party during the latter’s monthly breakfast.
Several local elected Republicans were in attendance, including Sen. Carl Ford, Rep. Dr. Grant Campbell and current Rowan County Board of Commissioners Chair Greg Edds, who is challenging Scott Huffman in the race for Harry Warren’s House seat. Commissioner Mike Caskey was also there.
During the breakfast, Whatley shared his campaign message, lobbing criticisms of his opponent, former N.C. Gov. Roy Cooper, while embracing a conservative platform he repeatedly called “common sense” measures for governance. Whatley defended President Donald Trump’s America First agenda and warned that if the Republicans fail to retain the United States Senate, it would drastically hamper Trump’s final two years in office.
Before he addressed the group of a couple dozen Republican supporters and party members, Whatley offered the Salisbury Post almost 15 minutes for a sit-down interview. During that interview, he discussed everything from his recent call to reform the Federal Emergency Management Agency to inflation reduction and lowering taxes.
“We need emergency disaster relief,” Whatley said. “We have to have emergency relief, but it has to be effective, right?”
In Whatley’s viewpoint, FEMA should not be administered by the federal government. He argues for a federally funded, state-administered model for disaster relief. He pointed to his time on Trump’s FEMA Review Council and the experience he gained as a result.
“What we did was we took a look at disaster relief, especially the federal role in disaster relief, and what we need is a system where you have local response, right, and then you have it managed by the states, and then the federal government is going to provide support for that,” he said. “You don’t want the federal government to be the first responder, right, and so you know where you have counties in North Carolina that responded to the storm, Helene, all right, but they couldn’t get you know clearances or permits or funding from the federal government in a timely manner. Like let’s have the federal government provide the funding to the states, and the states can oversee that.”
According to reporting from Politico last week, Trump actually overruled FEMA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) to deny disaster aid to Democratic-led states.
According to those reports, “high-ranking officials from regional offices (of those departments) agreed that the states met the necessary thresholds for receiving federal relief due to the historic natural disasters that impacted their states. However, President Trump ignored their findings and rejected the federal request for a disaster declaration anyway — a move that experts say has no modern precedent.
Those states included New York, Rhode Island, New Jersey and Massachusetts.
During the interview, Whatley criticized Cooper for not being in the state when Helene made landfall instead attending a climate change event in New York.
“He wasn’t even in North Carolina,” Whatley said. “And it took him days before he even got up there. And for the next three months, he was completely not present.”
Cooper was a speaker at a climate change conference hosted by the New York Times when the hurricane hit.
“Ron DeSantis was in Tallahassee at his emergency operations center getting ready,” Whatley said. “Brian Kemp was in Atlanta. Glenn Youngkin was in Richmond, right? Roy Cooper was in New York City.”
Whatley went on to say “what we saw with Hurricane Helene was that Joe Biden’s FEMA actually put out a memo that said if they have a Trump sign in the yard, don’t go to the house and offer them support.”
Reporting from the time did implicate a FEMA worker for telling a team responding to hurricane survivors to not go into homes with yard signs supporting Trump. However, FEMA Administrator Deanne Criswell called the employee’s action “reprehensible,” describing it as a clear violation of “FEMA’s core values and principles to help people regardless of their political affiliations.”
It was not the official position of the administration, and that employee, who was working in Florida, not North Carolina, was fired.
Whatley said that he was proud of the work he and the Trump administration did to get more than $10 billion worth of relief to western North Carolina, but said, “We still got a lot to go. Are we done? No. We’re not going to hang up a mission accomplished sign.”
The aspiring senator acknowledged that he anticipated a tight race in a deep purple state like North Carolina.
“We know that North Carolina is always a very, very tough state,” he said. “When you think about Thom Tillis, who I’m going to replace, you know, he won his first election by about 50,000 votes, yeah, three tenths of a point. You know, he doubled that up when he ran for reelection and got 50.5 percent. So we know that this is going to be an extraordinarily competitive race. That’s why I’m out visiting all 100 counties.”
A recent ad for Whatley said he was asking for North Carolina’s vote to fight rising prices, adding that Washington has “failed us.”
“I think what we need to do is look at under Joe Biden that inflation was 9 percent year over year, 30 percent over four years, and costs went through the roof,” he said. “Grocery prices, gasoline prices, housing prices all went through the roof. We need to bring down inflation. We need to bring down interest rates.”
According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, when Biden left office, inflation was around 2.9 percent. Inflation is currently 3.5 percent. Republicans control the White House, U.S. House of Representatives and the U.S. Senate.
Whatley also brought up rising prices of consumer goods.
“Gasoline prices are lower than they were under Joe Biden,” Whatley said. “They’re still too high. We need to get everything settled down in the Middle East and make sure that we get those prices at the pump down.”
According to GasBuddy, the average price of a gallon of gasoline in North Carolina in January 2025 was $2.86 per gallon. According to AAA, the average price of a gallon of gasoline in North Carolina on Monday was $3.79. The average cost of gasoline rose following Trump’s escalation of conflict in Iran earlier this year and, despite intermittent dips, has remained high.
“There is a lot of work to do,” Whatley said. “I mean, nobody’s saying mission accomplished … (Do) we support a prolonged war in Iran? No, absolutely not. I think the mission that the president has declared, which is to ensure that Iran does not have a nuclear weapon, is tremendously important for the entire world, but certainly for us here in the United States.”
According to PBS reporting from last week, the war, which began Feb. 28, “has cost at least $37.5 billion in direct military expenditures through mid-July, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth told lawmakers. It has also led to the deaths of 18 service members, with 624 wounded, as of late July.”
That same reporting indicated that nuclear policy specialists have said the country’s nuclear program has been damaged although not destroyed.
“Rebuilding some of these facilities will likely take considerable time and cost billions of dollars,” said Arman Mahmoudian, a research fellow at the University of South Florida’s Global & National Security Institute. “Iran has also lost a number of senior nuclear scientists and high-ranking military commanders.”
Whatley also said that he supported tariffs for consumer goods even if they raised costs for the average American family.
“The fact is we need a trade regime, and tariffs are part of it,” he said. “But we need an overall trade regime that is going to be a benefit for American manufacturers, for American farmers, for American small businesses. It’s important for us to understand overall what that is going to look like. Are we creating market access for our farmers and for our goods overseas? That is going to be tremendously important. At the same time, what can we do to make sure that we’re protecting U.S. manufacturers? You know, and so we need to get manufacturing stronger here in the United States. The president is working very hard to make sure that we’re onshoring, you know, those types of jobs. I support that function, but overall, the trade agenda needs to be America-centric.”
