Trump: No 3,000 dead in Puerto Rico storm
President claims total was invented by Democrats
WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump on Thursday rejected the official conclusion that nearly 3,000 people died in Puerto Rico from last year’s Hurricane Maria, arguing without evidence that the number was wrong and calling it a plot by Democrats to make him “look as bad as possible.”
As Hurricane Florence approached the Carolinas, the president picked a fresh fight over his administration’s response to the Category 4 storm that smashed into the U.S. territory last September. Trump visited the island in early October to assess the situation amid widespread criticism over recov- President Donald Trump disputes the conclusions of a GWU report. ery efforts.
In morning tweets, Trump took issue with the findings of a sweeping report released last month by George Washington University that estimated there were 2,975 “excess deaths” in the six months after the storm made landfall in Puerto Rico in September 2017.
“When I left the Island, AFTER the storm had hit, they had anywhere from 6 to 18 deaths. As time went by it did not go up by much. Then, a long time later, they started to report really large numbers, like 3000,” Trump tweeted.
He added: “This was done by the Democrats in order to make me look as
bad as possible when I was successfully raising Billions of Dollars to help rebuild Puerto Rico. If a person died for any reason, like old age, just add them onto the list. Bad politics. I love Puerto Rico!”
Puerto Rico’s governor last month raised Maria’s official death toll from 64 to 2,975 after the independent study found that the number of people who succumbed in the sweltering aftermath had been severely undercounted.
Previous reports from the Puerto Rican government estimated that the number was closer to 1,400.
Trump’s comments drew swift criticism from elected officials and residents of the island, where blackouts remain common, 60,000 homes still have makeshift roofs and 13 percent of municipalities lack stable phone or internet service. Gov. Ricardo Rossello said in a Facebook post in Spanish, “The victims of Puerto Rico, and the people of Puerto Rico in general, do not deserve to be questioned about their pain.”
Rossello said he left the analysis of the deaths in the hands of experts and accepted their estimate as the official death toll. “I trust that this process was carried out properly,” he said. He also said he was waiting for Trump to respond to a petition to help Puerto Rico complete work on emergency housing restoration programs and debris removal.
San Juan Mayor Carmen Yulin Cruz, a Democrat who has sparred with Trump, tweeted that “Trump is so vain he thinks this is about him. NO IT IS NOT.” Rep. Luis Gutierrez, an Illinois Democrat whose parents were Puerto Rican immigrants, spoke on the House floor in front of a printout of the Puerto Rican flag, saying Trump is “delusional” and incapable of “empathy or basic human decency.”
Some Republicans joined the chorus of criticism. House Speaker Paul Ryan said: “Casualties don’t make a person look bad. So I have no reason to dispute those numbers.”
Rep. Ileana Ros Lehtinen, R-Fla., told reporters she believes the figure of nearly 3,000 is sound. “What kind of mind twists that statistic into ‘Oh, fake news is trying to hurt my image’?” she said. “How can you be so self-centered and try to distort the truth so much? It’s mind-boggling.”
Trump began to focus on Hurricane Florence earlier this week, calling for an Oval Office briefing with the FEMA director to warn about the threat. As the storm began to dominate news coverage, the administration’s efforts after Hurricane Maria came under new scrutiny and the coverage began to infuriate Trump, according to two Republican advisers close to the White House who weren’t authorized to speak publicly.
When a reporter asked Trump about Maria in the Oval Office, he swiftly unleashed a fact-challenged defense of his response to the hurricane. That led the cable news coverage that evening.
Trump told confidants the media were underplaying the challenging circumstances in Puerto Rico and trying to exploit the storm to attack him. He told one adviser he felt that he media “would stop at nothing” to undermine him and blamed local authorities for an inept response.
Carlos Santos-Burgoa, the principal investigator of the GWU study and a professor in the Department of Global Health, said Friday afternoon that he and his colleagues were unbiased in their work and received no political pressure from Democrats or anyone else to come up with a high estimate of storm-related deaths.
“We stand by the science underlying our study. It is rigorous. It’s state of the art. We collected the data from the official sources. Everything can be validated,” Santos-Burgoa told The Washington Post. “We didn’t receive any pressure from anybody to go this way or that way. We wouldn’t do it. We are professionals of public health.”
In his tweets, Trump thoroughly mischaracterized how the GWU researchers came up with the figure of 2,975 excess deaths. They did not, contrary to the president’s claim, attribute any specific individual’s death to Hurricane Maria. Given the methodology, there was not an opportunity to misclassify someone who died from old age, as Trump suggested.
Rather, the GWU study looked at the number of deaths from September 2017 to February 2018 and compared that total to what would have been expected based on historical patterns. They factored in many variables, including the departure of hundreds of thousands of island residents in the aftermath of Maria.
The study said the original estimates were so low because doctors on the island had not been trained to properly classify deaths after a natural disaster.