A man with ties to Donald Trump donors has questioned whether the government is manipulating Hurricane Milton’s path.
On Monday morning, Milton—which exhibited rapid intensification overnight—was classified as a Category 5 hurricane with maximum sustained winds of 160 miles per hour, the most recent National Hurricane Center (NHC) update said.
Forecasts show Milton making landfall in the Tampa Bay area on Wednesday, but the expected wind speeds at landfall are still uncertain.
Milton comes only two weeks after Hurricane Helene made landfall in Florida’s Big Bend region before cutting inland. Helene has killed hundreds of people, and hundreds of thousands more remain without power. Milton’s path will likely take the storm across Florida, with widespread impacts affecting coastal regions of Georgia and South Carolina. However, the incoming storm’s impacts will likely miss the areas that were hardest hit by Helene.
Grant Cardone, who has expressed support for former President Trump, is the husband of Elena Cardone and brother of Gary Cardone. Elena Cardone launched a GoFundMe page to fundraise for Trump’s legal fees, and Gary Cardone donated thousands of dollars in Bitcoin to Trump’s 2024 campaign. On Sunday night, Grant Cardone questioned Hurricane Milton’s path in a post on X, formerly Twitter.
“I grew up on the Gulf of Mexico. Been watching storms since I was a young boy. I have NEVER seen a storm start here and go east,” Cardone posted with a picture of Milton’s forecast path toward Florida. “Do you think Gov’t is using technology to manipulate weather patterns & storms?”
Cardone’s question comes as other Republicans, such as Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, have appeared to say that Democrats control the weather. As of Monday afternoon, Cardone’s post has been viewed 4.2 million times.
Newsweek reached out to the NHC by email for comment.
Waves from the Gulf of Mexico crash on shore amid Hurricane Helene churns offshore in St. Pete Beach, Florida, on September 26. Grant Cardone questioned whether the government can control the weather because of Hurricane Milton’s storm path.
Joe Raedle/Getty
Despite Cardone’s concerns, Milton is not the first storm to originate in the Gulf and then cut east. AccuWeather Senior Director of Forecasting Operations Dan DePodwin told Newsweek that hurricanes have taken many different tracks throughout history.
Although a storm originating in the Bay of Campeche and then moving east, as Hurricane Milton has done, is not as common as storms that originate in the Caribbean and move west, it does happen. Milton’s track is more common later in the hurricane season, DePodwin said, as storms are more likely to form closer to the U.S. at that time.
“Claims of people influencing the track of hurricanes have no basis in science or fact,” DePodwin said.
However, DePodwin added that there’s not much history of a hurricane making direct landfall in Tampa. The last time a storm made direct landfall in Tampa was 1921.
“This is not anything most people have experienced,” he said, adding that people in the storm’s path should pay attention to advisories and evacuation orders related to the storm.
