Trump Is Angry With Puerto Rico for Making Him Look Bad

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Well, he does everything bigly. Now Trump has made Bush’s “heck of a job, Brownie” moment look like Clara Barton arriving on the battlefield.

As I posted yesterday, the Trump Administration’s tepid “response” to the humanitarian crisis in Puerto Rico pales in comparison to what Obama did for Haiti in 2010. Even the general in charge of relief there says the Administration isn’t doing enough.

Yesterday in response to some blather from the acting head of Homeland Security about what a great job the Administration is doing in Puerto Rico, San Juan Mayor Carmen Yulín Cruz responded “Dammit, this is not a good news story. This is a ‘people are dying’ story.”

Ms. Cruz became a powerful voice of grievance on Friday when she went on television to plead for help and reject assertions by the Trump administration about how well it was responding. She was incensed by comments made by Elaine Duke, the acting secretary of Homeland Security, who had said on Thursday that it was “really a good news story in terms of our ability to reach people and the limited number of deaths” from the hurricane.

“This is, dammit, this is not a good news story,” Ms. Cruz said on CNN. “This is a ‘people are dying’ story. This is a ‘life or death’ story. This is ‘there’s a truckload of stuff that cannot be taken to people’ story. This is a story of a devastation that continues to worsen.”

Naturally, Trump responded by being Trump.

The president is responding by citing what he calls “such poor leadership ability by the Mayor of San Juan, and others in Puerto Rico, who are not able to get their workers to help.”

Trump says “they want everything to be done for them when it should be a community effort. 10,000 Federal workers now on Island doing a fantastic job.”

He says the hurricane “totally destroyed” Puerto Rico and that “the military and first responders, despite no electric, roads, phones etc., have done an amazing job.”

And, of course, the asshole in chief is screaming about fake news.

The Washington Post has a different take:

As Hurricane Maria made landfall on Wednesday, Sept. 20, there was a frenzy of activity publicly and privately. The next day, President Trump called local officials on the island, issued an emergency declaration and pledged that all federal resources would be directed to help.

But then for four days after that — as storm-ravaged Puerto Rico struggled for food and water amid the darkness of power outages — Trump and his top aides effectively went dark themselves.

Trump jetted to New Jersey that Thursday night to spend a long weekend at his private golf club there, save for a quick trip to Alabama for a political rally. Neither Trump nor any of his senior White House aides said a word publicly about the unfolding crisis.

Trump did hold a meeting at his golf club that Friday with half a dozen Cabinet officials — including acting Homeland Security secretary Elaine Duke, who oversees disaster response — but the gathering was to discuss his new travel ban, not the hurricane. Duke and Trump spoke briefly about Puerto Rico but did not talk again until Tuesday, an administration official said.

 

In Puerto Rico, meanwhile, the scope of the devastation was becoming clearer. Virtually the entire island was without power and much of it could be for weeks, officials estimated, and about half of the more than 3 million residents did not have access to clean water. Gas was in short supply, airports and ports were in disrepair, and telecommunications infrastructure had been destroyed.

Instead of stepping up his act, Trump has behaved like a petulant child complaining that not everybody loves him and picking a feud with the Mayor of San Juan.

See also Hurricane Maria’s death toll in Puerto Rico is higher than official count, experts say.

10 thoughts on “Trump Is Angry With Puerto Rico for Making Him Look Bad”

  1. I don’t think I’ve ever come across a human being, public or private, with this mix of lack of empathy, ignorance, obliviousness, narcissism, self-dealing and racism, as there apparently exists in Trump. That he is the “president” is an absolute disaster not just for America but for the world.

    Clearly, Trump is treating Puerto Rico like this because of who the people are; if they were white Americans they wouldn’t be treated that way. He talked about the “optics” of Tom Price taking trips on the taxpayers dime; how about the optics of this bigoted bozo criticizing San Juan’s mayor from his luxury golf course.

    It just amazes me that there apparently exists millions of Americans who applaud this behavior and/or see nothing wrong with it.

  3. Central Florida was slammed by 3 hurricanes in’04. Charlie was the worst, leaving me with a smashed jungle, two weeks with no electricity, and because we were on a well, no water for drinking or more importantly, showers. When the storms pass, every stinging or biting insect comes out, and the humidity is brutal. The thing about Charlie was the relatively small swath of destruction. After two days of chainsaw work, we could hop in the truck and get to food and gasoline.
    Irma just hit us pretty hard, but we had only 3 days without power. I still have several mpnths of tree debris removal to occupy my time, and the big pine with the active bald eagle nest is leaning at 60 degrees, the worst news is I’m now 63 and not so fast as I was in ’04. Unless one has gone through this kind of storm, it’s hard to imagine. Even though we were given several days to prepare, plywood, fasteners, and all of the other hurricane supplies were snapped up to a point where people were buying Styrofoam sheets to protect their windows. Just like the ’04 storms, Irma changed its path and came right through here; we caught “the dirty side” having several small tornadoes run through the neighborhood. The sound of a tornado near one’s house is rather frightening. Irma hit us as a low cat 2 . It’s hard to imagine a high end cat 4 as big as Maria was hitting a highly populated area like San Juan.
    Trump’s puffery and lack of empathy, let alone total lack of understanding disaster response is not at all shocking to me. He needs to go. He apparently thought being the President was going to be all fun and games. Not so much.

  4. Looked at another way, Trump had an additional several days warning before the hurricane that Haiti and Obama did not for the earthquake…

  5. His problem with the mayor from San Juan is that the mayor is a woman. How dare any woman talk so badly about good ol’ trumpy and his incompetence. I’ll bet he won’t even take her calls, let alone be civil to her.

  6. “It just amazes me that there apparently exists millions of Americans who applaud this behavior and/or see nothing wrong with it”

    Trump hates the same people they hate, it does not matter what he does they will support him, unless of course he starts to help the people they hate, which aint gonna happen! Swami, that’s pretty gross in a delightfully sickening kind of way!

  7. As bad as Trump is, it would appear others in his party are similarly unable to speak in public without spewing breathtaking ignorance as well as unfashionable callousness.

    Witness this swamp creature:

    http://www.wisn.com/article/johnson-access-to-health-care-a-privilege/12655631

    I didn’t watch the vid, but had I been the moderator I would have publicly eviscerated him about his utter ignorance of the Constitution until his ears bled and he collapsed in a puddle of slime. So, in his sorry dystopia, guns are, no doubt, a must-have and food, shelter, education are “nice to haves”?

    He just created an attack ad against himself.

  8. uncledad…I guess I could have exhibited a bit more maturity in posting that gif.. It was an impulsive posting and I had second thoughts after I had hit the submit button. But being in a permanent state of moderation I thought maybe Maha would pull me back from the edge of such a childish display by not allowing it to go through. No real harm done though, just a little tarnish on my flawless image of respectability…and like they say, impulsiveness in the defense of decency is no vice.

  9. “permanent state of moderation”

    You too? I just figured since I’d been twit-filtered so many times that I had it coming!

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