With Hurricane Florence bearing down on the East Coast, Donald Trump thought it was a good job to tweet about Hurricane Maria’s impact on Puerto Rico. Rather than warning people of the risks posed by hurricanes, he decided to make it about him and deny that nearly 3,000 Americans died on his watch because of a poor federal response.
In back-to-back tweets, Trump said the 3,000 excess deaths in the storm and its aftermath—a number from a report written by top public health researchers and commissioned by the Puerto Rico government—was actually fabricated by Democrats to make him look bad. So yes, Donald Trump is not just a climate denier, he’s a hurricane death denier.
“Bad politics,” he tweeted. “I love Puerto Rico!”
Bad politics isn’t working diligently to estimate how many lives were lost in a storm. It’s calling the response to Maria an “unsung success” when it was clearly anything but. And loving Puerto Rico would mean not going there for a photo op, shooting hoops with paper towels, and then flying away as the federal response continues to flounder.
3000 people did not die in the two hurricanes that hit Puerto Rico. 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…
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) September 13, 2018
…..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!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) September 13, 2018
Look, the bar is incredibly low for Donald Trump. He says wildly outlandish things and frequently lies. But this is a new bottoming out, disgracing thousands of Americans who died on his watch and their families who are still picking up the pieces. Hurricane Maria is an American tragedy that we’re still seeing unfold almost a year after the storm.
And the timing is even more disturbing given what the Carolinas face. Hurricane Florence could drop a record-setting amount of rain, batter the coasts with storm surge, and unleash a torrent of toxic waste.
