Trump tours Puerto Rico’ s devastation
Trump tours Puerto Rico, views recovery effffffffffffort.
Hehighlights the relatively low death toll compared with Katrina andvows an all-out effffffort to help the island.
SAN JUAN, PUERTO RICO — Touring a small slice of Hurricane Maria’s devastation, President Donald Trump congratulated Puerto Rico on Tuesday for escaping the higher death toll of “a real catastrophe like Katrina” and heaped praise on the relief efffffffffffforts of his administration without mentioning the sharp criticism the federal response has drawn.
“Really nothing short of a miracle,” he said of the recovery, an assessment at odds with the despair of many still struggling to fifind water and food outside the capital city in wides waths of an island where only 5 percent of electricity customers have power back. The death count of 16is expected to rise.
In the heart of SanJuan, in fact, a fewmiles fromthe air base where Trump gave his thumbs-up report on progress, people stacked sewage-fouled clothes and mattresses outside houses and businesses lacking electricity nearly two weeks after the storm. “Nobody’s come,” said Ray Negron, 38, collecting debris in the Playita neighborhood.
Trump pledged an allout effffffffffffort to help the island while adding, somewhat lightly, “Now I hate to tell you, Puerto Rico, but you’ve thrown our budget a little out of whack because we’ve spent a lot of money on Puerto Rico. And that’s fine. We’ve saved a lot of lives.”
The visit offffffffffffered fresh evidence of the unconventional
path Trump has taken in responding to the one-two-three punch from hurricanes Harvey, Irma and Maria. His effusive praise for federal relief efffffffffffforts has overshadowed his displays of empathy for those who are suffffffffffffering. And in Puerto Rico, in particular, his criticism of local people for not doing more to help themselves has struck an offff note during a time of crisis.
Trump said his visit was “not about me” but then praised local officials for offffffffffffering kind words about his administration’s recovery effffffffffffort and invited one to repeat the “nice things” she’d said earlier. Trump also singled out Gov. Ricardo Rossello for “giving us the highest praise.”
“Every death is a horror,” he said, “but if you look at a real catastrophe like Katrina and you look at the tremendous, hundreds of and hundreds and hundreds of people that died, and you look at what happened here with, really, a storm that was just totally overpowering, nobody has ever seen anything like this.” He told local offifficials “you can be
very proud of all your people, all of our people working together.”
Known deaths from Maria in the U.S. territory stand at 16. But local officials caution that any accounting of death and destruction is far fromc omplete as people suffer secondary effffffffffffects from thirst, hunger and extreme heat without air conditioning. As for Katrina, as many as 1,800people died in2005 when levees protecting New Orleans broke, a toll in lives and property that took years to understand.
Trump’s most prominent critic in Puerto Rico, SanJuan Mayor Carmen Yulin Cruz, joined other offifficials at the air base for a briefifing with him, shook the president’s hand and said afterward she hoped he now understood the gravity of the situation. But his comment implying Maria was not a Katrina-level event left her unsure.
“Sometimes his style of communication gets in the way,” she told CNN. “Iwould hope that the president of the UnitedStates stops spouting out comments that really hurt the people of Puerto Rico.”