Trump an ‘absolute no’ toward Puerto Rico statehood
President Donald Trump said in a radio interview broadcast Monday that he is an “absolute no” on statehood for Puerto Rico, citing his running feud with San Juan Mayor Carmen Yulin Cruz, a critic of the federal response to Hurricane Maria.
“With the mayor of San Juan as bad as she is and as incompetent as she is, Puerto Rico shouldn’t be talking about statehood until they get some people that really know what they’re doing,” Mr. Trump told host Geraldo Rivera in an interview conducted Sunday with WTAM Radio in Cleveland, later calling Ms. Cruz “a horror show.”
Mr. Trump’s assessment brought a rebuke from Ricardo Rosselló, the governor of the commonwealth, who has been making a stepped-up effort to persuade Mr. Trump and Congress to support statehood in the wake of the first anniversary of the storm.
“This is an insensitive, disrespectful comment to over 3 million Americans who live in the U.S. territory of Puerto Rico,” Mr. Rosselló said in as statement in which he also lamented “the unequal and colonial relationship between the United States and Puerto Rico.”
In the aftermath of Maria, Ms. Cruz made repeated public pleas for more immediate aid from the federal government, which angered Mr. Trump.
The two have continued to spar.
Earlier this month, when Mr. Trump characterized the federal response to Maria as an “incredible, unsung success,” Ms. Cruz pushed back on Twitter, writing: “If he thinks the death of 3,000 people [is] a success God help us all.”
Speaking of Ms. Cruz on Monday, Mr. Trump said that “with people like that involved in Puerto Rico, I would be an absolute no” on statehood.
“If you had people like the mayor of San Juan, whatever her name may be, she is a horror show,” Mr. Trump said. “She was so bad and so disrespectful to our military, to our first responders, and to our great FEMA people who did a phenomenal job,” he added, referring to the Federal Emergency Management Agency.
A Washington PostKaiser Family Foundation poll released this month found that a 48 percent plurality of Puerto Ricans think the territory should be admitted to the United States as the 51st state. Twenty-six percent said it should remain a territory, and 10 percent said it should become an independent nation. Meanwhile, 61 percent said the federal government’s hurricane response in Puerto Rico would have been better if it were a state.
In a letter to Mr. Trump and in TV interviews last week, Mr. Rosselló argued that disparate federal responses to Puerto Rico and other states affected by hurricanes underscore the need to alter the U.S. territory’s status.
Puerto Ricans can vote in presidential primaries, but not in general elections.
In a referendum last year, 97 percent of those in Puerto Rico who voted chose statehood, but just 23 percent of registered voters cast ballots. The vote was viewed as flawed, and opposition parties boycotted it.