‘Never mind the thousands dead in Puerto Rico... what about me?’
EVEN if you are sceptical of Bob Woodward’s account of a vain, paranoid president obsessing over his enemies’ attacks, the events of the past few days offer fresh evidence that Donald Trump is lost in his own chaos.
Now he is using thousands of Americans’ deaths to position himself as the victim of mendacious Democrats. It is difficult to imagine a more effective way to prove his detractors right.
His argument, unveiled on Twitter
(of course), is that his opponents have exaggerated the number of people killed when Hurricane Maria hit Puerto Rico. Their motive? To discredit his presidency.
“3,000 people did not die in the two hurricanes that hit Puerto Rico,” he wrote, explaining that when he visited in the immediate aftermath the official toll was fewer than 20.
Things have changed since then. The number has been growing steadily, as more reports were collated, and then last week came the big jump. Preliminary findings published by researchers at George Washington University increased the number of dead from 64 to 2,975.
That’s a huge leap, and Mr Trump thought he understood what was happening.
“This was done by the Democrats in order to make me look as bad as possible when I was successfully raising billions of dollars to help rebuild Puerto Rico,” he wrote.
His explanation that this was down to “bad politics” is an even bigger leap. In fact, the revision comes from the standard method of calculating excess deaths: counting the number of people who died and comparing it with what might be expected during that period based on statistical models and demographic information.
It is a better way of estimating the numbers killed by the storm than relying on cause of death entered on death certificates. As the researchers pointed out, power shortages, lack of training and the confusion of the storm all contributed to delays, errors and inaccuracies in recording cause of death.
So it is no great surprise the revised number differs so much from early counts. It is just what happens in disasters, more so when the island’s lack of preparation and collapse into dysfunction was so apparent.
Yet that is not good enough for this president, it seems. New information does not complete the picture. For him, the changes are incompatible with the first impressions, and can only be explained in terms of a conspiracy or plot against him.
So forget any idea the new numbers represent more lives to be mourned, more sympathy and aid for Puerto Rico, which is after all part of the US. For Mr Trump, there’s only one person that matters in all of this – himself. Never mind the suffering of people in Puerto Rico, can anyone see his pain?
So while he disputes the accounts of books and briefings portraying him as an angry, paranoid man railing at the world from the Oval Office, that is exactly what he is doing. (© Daily Telegraph, London)