President Trump’s hurricane response is delusional

Consistent with his endless selfpraise for his performance in office, President Donald Trump chose the arrival of Hurricane Florence as the occasion to give himself “an A-plus” in last year’s Hurricane Maria assault on Puerto Rico.

He has challenged the island government’s assessment that nearly 3,000 Puerto Ricans died as a result of Maria, which left the territory without power and water for months, insisting no more than 18 had perished at the time he visited the devastation about a year ago.

Calling that widely condemned response “an incredible unsung success,” the president tweeted that “the Democrats” inflated the death toll “in order to make me look as bad as possible when I was successfully raising Billions of Dollars to help rebuild Puerto Rico.”

The much larger number comes from a George Washington University study commissioned by the local government under San Juan Mayor Carmen Yulin Cruz. Gov. Ricardo Rossello has responded that “the people of Puerto Rico don’t deserve to have their pain questioned” by Mr. Trump, calling on him to order all federal agencies “to keep working” to finish the recovery.

A White House spokesman offers that “President Trump was responding to the liberal media and the San Juan mayor who, sadly, have tried to exploit the devastation by pushing out a constant stream of misinformation and false accusations.”

One result of the president’s ill-timed boast of his much-publicized post-hurricane visit to the stricken island has been the resurrection of television clips in which Mr. Trump, as if shooting baskets in a schoolyard playground, flipped rolls of paper towels to Puerto Ricans as his contribution to the cleanup.