Puerto Rico response ‘fantastic,’ Trump maintains
President Donald Trump on Wednesday defended his administration’s response to a devastating hurricane in Puerto Rico last year, despite a study released this week that said there was a spike in deaths on the island in the six months that followed.
“I think we did a fantastic job,” Trump said, responding to a question from a reporter at the White House. He called the emergency on the island “by far the most difficult” of the areas of the United States and its territories ravaged by a series of hurricanes.
“It’s hard to get things on the island,” Trump said, comparing the situation with response efforts in Texas and Florida, which also suffered significant damage.
Trump’s upbeat assessment of the disaster appears to have changed little from October 2017, when the official death toll was just 16 people. At that time, Trump compared the storm’s damage with the 1,833 people who were killed by Hurricane Katrina in 2005. Katrina became a millstone for then-President George W. Bush, who had praised his administration’s response before the true toll was known.
The president’s remarks came a day after a sweeping new report from George Washington University found that there were an estimated 2,975 excess deaths on the island after Maria made landfall in September 2017. The Puerto Rican government embraced the findings as the official death toll, ranking Maria among the deadliest natural disasters in U.S. history. For much of the past year, the government had formally acknowledged just 64 deaths from the hurricane, which ravaged much of the territory and destroyed critical infrastructure. The spike in mortality came as the territory dealt with widespread and lengthy power failures, a lack of access to adequate health care, water insecurity and diseases related to the crisis.
The report is based on researchers’ analysis of excess deaths that took place in Puerto Rico between September 2017 and February 2018. Another report to Congress earlier this month found there were 1,427 more deaths in the four months after Maria than was typical over the comparable four months in the previous four years.
Trump and his administration had been heavily criticized for not responding to the crisis in Puerto Rico as thoroughly as they did to the disasters caused by Hurricanes Harvey and Irma in the continental United States. As he had in the wake of the storms last year, Trump emphasized the magnitude of the challenge Wednesday, calling the back-to-back hurricanes “the likes of which we have never seen before,” and sought to shift blame onto Puerto Rico, citing the U.S. territory’s debt and infrastructure problems as contributing to the crisis.
“When the hurricane came, people said, ‘What are we going to do about the electrical?’ That wasn’t really the hurricane. It was before the hurricane,” Trump said. “We’ve put a lot of money and a lot of effort into Puerto Rico.”
Trump praised Gov. Ricardo Rossello on Wednesday for his cooperation with Washington, calling him “an excellent guy” who is “very happy with the job we’ve done.”
At a news conference Tuesday, Rossello accepted the George Washington University report, which found that his administration was largely unprepared for the magnitude of the storm, and acknowledged he had “made mistakes.”
It is “time to correct what we didn’t do well,” he said.
Trump praised the Federal Emergency Management Agency as “very brave” in its response to the storms last year. Of Puerto Rico, he said: “I only hope they don’t get hit again. … Puerto Rico had a lot of difficulties before they got hit. We’re straightening out those difficulties even now.”
Responding to Trump’s assessment of his administration’s handling of storm damage, San Juan Mayor Carmen Yulin Cruz, who has been consistently critical of Trump’s response, said on MSNBC that the 2,975 deaths “will follow him wherever he goes for the rest of his life.”