President Trump on Friday cited the death toll in Puerto Rico as evidence of his administration’s success in handling Hurricane Maria recovery efforts.
“The loss of life — it’s always tragic — but it’s been incredible the results that we’ve had with respect to loss of life,” Trump said. “People can’t believe how successful that has been, relatively speaking.”
At least 16 people have died in Puerto Rico, officials say, a number that is expected to climb as the recovery continues.
WASHINGTON—Claryse Flores’s brother lives in San Juan, Puerto Rico. He texted her Thursday night about the long lines he still faces for water, gas, food.
On Friday, she heard President Donald Trump talk, again, about Puerto Rico’s debts. And she heard him tell a crowd of businesspeople that Puerto Rico’s government would have to help figure out how to pay the cost of the massive rebuilding effort.
She fumed.
“I don’t remember him discussing costs when he came to Texas or when he came to Florida,” said Flores, 37, a New Jersey receptionist of Puerto Rican descent. “I’m not surprised. I followed the election, and I am from New York, so I’ve known the name Trump for a very long time. But when people are suffering and dying, and that’s my family, I’m beyond offended.”
Trump earned broad public approval, polls show, for his enthusiastic response to Hurricane Harvey in Texas and Hurricane Irma in Florida. But his response to the Hurricane Maria disaster in Puerto Rico has been markedly different, in both actions and words.
The disparity has been noted with intense dismay by many Puerto Ricans on the mainland. As they worry about their families and friends on the island, they have been forced to grapple with a series of apparent passive-aggressive slights from their president.
Some of them say Trump’s response to Maria is another example of the bigotry they saw in a presidential campaign Trump began by calling Mexican immigrants rapists. And some say it is another example of a lingering “colonial” attitude in the federal government’s approach to the island commonwealth the U.S. invaded in 1898.
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