Storm response in Puerto Rico ‘incredibly successful’: Trump

WASHINGTON — With a powerful hurricane bearing down on the Southeast coast of the United States, President Donald Trump on Tuesday turned attention back to the federal government’s response to Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico a year ago, deeming it “incredibly successful” even though a recent federal report found that nearly 3,000 people died.

The administration’s efforts in Puerto Rico received widespread criticism. But after visiting the island last September, Trump said that Puerto Ricans were fortunate that the storm did not yield a catastrophe akin to the havoc wreaked by Hurricane Katrina along the Gulf Coast.

All told, about 1,800 people died in that 2005 storm. Puerto Rico’s governor last month raised the U.S. territory’s official death toll from Hurricane Maria from 64 to 2,975. The storm is also estimated to have caused $100 billion in damage.

“I actually think it was one of the best jobs that’s ever been done with respect to what this is all about,” Trump said Tuesday of the response in Puerto Rico, suggesting that it was made more difficult by the “island nature” of the storm site.

The president praised the response to the series of storms that battered the United States last year, saying, “I think Puerto Rico was an incredible, unsung success. Texas, we’ve been given A-pluses for. Florida, we’ve been given A-pluses for.”

The governor of Puerto Rico, Ricardo Rossello, seized on Trump’s use of the word “successful” and said in a statement issued later Tuesday: “No relationship between a colony and the federal government can ever be called ‘successful’ because Puerto Ricans lack certain inalienable rights enjoyed by our fellow Americans in the states.”