Trump rejects Puerto Rico storm toll of 3,000 as ‘Democrat plot’

WASHINGTON, D.C.: US President Donald Trump on Thursday (Friday in

toll from last year’s Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico, saying it

as part of a ploy to make him look bad.

Trump’s controversial remarks sparked a rare bipartisan backlash, with even some members of his own party echoing the condemnation from Democratic opposition leaders.

Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, a veteran Republican congresswoman from Florida, said Trump “has a warped mind that would turn this statistic into fake news.”

“It might be a new low,” she said. “How could you be so selfcentered and try to distort the truth so much?”

The true human cost of Maria, and the chaotic federal response to the storm on the US island territory, triggered a year- long controversy, which Trump revived this week even as another powerful hurricane, Florence, bore down on the East Coast.

the two hurricanes that hit Puerto Rico,” Trump tweeted early on Thursday. “When I left the Island, AFTER the storm had hit, they had anywhere from 6 to 18 deaths.”

“Then, a long time later, they started to report really large num-

on to claim: “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.”

“If a person died for any reason, like old age, just add them onto the list.”

Hurricane Maria killed 2,975 people in Puerto Rico, a longawaited independent investigation by George Washington University into the 2017 storm concluded last month. It was initially said to have killed just 64 people.

Maria destroyed Puerto Rico’s electricity grid, leaving the island largely without power for weeks and crippling its health care system.

After nearly a year of contro-

governor said the new estimate would now be considered the

Puerto Rico Gov. Ricardo Rossello has also criticized Trump for not providing additional federal funds still needed for emergency housing and debris removal.