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White House hurls new insults at P.R. mayor
THE STORMY feud between President Trump and San Juan Mayor Carmen Yulín Cruz raged another day on Thursday, with the White House criticizing Cruz for waiting until Trump left Puerto Rico to protest his appearance there.
“I think that it is sad that the mayor of San Juan chose to make that a political statement instead of a time of focusing on the relief efforts,” White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said in her media briefing.
Trump “opened up the floor for discussion (during his visit) and she actually made zero comments,” Sanders added.
“Instead, she chose to wait until the President left, and then she criticized him on TV, and I think that was the wrong thing to do.”
Trump and Cruz have been disparaging each other through the press and social media for nearly a week as criticism poured in over Trump’s response to the damage caused by Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico.
The most recent shot came from Cruz, who wore a T-shirt with the word “NASTY” written on it while castigating Trump in a TV interview the day after he visited the U.S. territory.
The shirt appeared to be a comeback to Trump — who had previously called Cruz “nasty” — and also a flashback to Trump’s “nasty woman” label of Hillary Clinton, which her supporters turned into a rallying cry for her presidential campaign.
In the Univision interview, Cruz called out Trump for his apparent impatience with the struggling citizens of Puerto Rico.
“When someone is bothered by someone claiming lack of drinking water, lack of medicine for the sick and lack of food for the hungry, that person has problems too deep to be explained in an interview,” she said.
“What is really nasty is that anyone would turn their back on the Puerto Rican people.”
Trump and Cruz put their feud aside for a day when the President toured the damage from Maria on Tuesday. They appeared to get along during his appearance, and Cruz at no point criticized Trump or the federal government’s storm response to his face.
As of Thursday, 9% of Puerto Rico has electricity working again and 54% of the residents have access to drinking water, according to a website maintained by Puerto Rican Gov. Ricardo Rossello’s office.
Both of those statistics vanished without explanation Thursday from a website run by the Federal Emergency Management Agency for updates on Maria recovery.