Talking points
Trump’s Maria conspiracy theory
Only a president with a “complete absence of empathy” would deny the deaths of Americans under his watch, said Max Boot in The Washington Post. Yet President Trump did just that last week, attacking the idea that Hurricane Maria could have caused nearly 3,000 deaths on Puerto Rico—as estimated by a recent government-commissioned study. He tweeted that when he left the island after a post-storm visit in September 2017, “they had anywhere from six to 18 deaths.” Democrats then inflated the death toll, he claimed, “to make me look as bad as possible.” What absolute nonsense, said The New York Times in an editorial. The rise in the death figures isn’t partisan trickery, but the result of researchers accessing better information than was available in Maria’s chaotic aftermath. That inconvenient data undermines Trump’s claim that his response to Maria was an “incredible unsung success” and so in his mind must be the product of a conspiracy. “The 3,000 lives lost, in other words, are all about him.”
Trump was right to question the revised death toll, said Mary Anastasia O’Grady in The Wall Street Journal. The researchers at George Washington University who came up with the 3,000 figure looked at how many “excess mortalities” occurred in the six months after the storm. But how do you calculate exactly who died as a result of the storm and who died because the storm exposed decades of underinvestment in the island’s infrastructure? “The failure of medical equipment due to power outages, for example, may have been one cause of numerous post-storm deaths.” But local officials mismanaged the power company for years, leaving the grid “highly vulnerable when the storm hit.” By focusing on Trump, critics are simply helping “island politicians dodge their own responsibility for the loss of life.”
There’s plenty of blame to go around, said Danny Vinik in Politico.com. The U.S. Government Accountability Office has found numerous problems with FEMA’s Maria response, including its lack of skilled personnel in Puerto Rico. But the GOP-controlled Congress has held only two hearings into the government’s handling of the hurricane. By contrast, the Senate alone held 22 hearings in the six months after Hurricane Katrina in 2005. So long as Congress abdicates its oversight role, disaster experts say, it will be difficult to help FEMA learn from its mistakes or to provide a thorough accounting of what happened to “refute claims like the one in Trump’s tweet.”