President Donald Trump met with local leaders and federal responders shortly after landing at an Air Force base in Carolina, Puerto Rico, for what was supposed to be a briefing on the situation on the island.
Instead, Trump turned it into an opportunity to congratulate himself and the federal government's response to the disaster and to say the island should be “very proud” of its low official death count.
He downplayed throughout his remarks how dire things are in Puerto Rico, where more than half of the people on the island don't have power, running water or cell phone service two weeks after the Category 4 storm tore through.
"We have gone all out for Puerto Rico," Trump said during the televised briefing Tuesday. "It's not only dangerous, it's expensive."
And while Puerto Rico clearly needs much more aid — including help from the Federal Emergency Management Agency
to repair its damaged infrastructure — Trump decided to focus on how much money it had already spent.
"You've thrown our budget out of whack," he said. "We've spend a lot of money in Puerto Rico."
The most uncomfortable part of his remarks came when he began to compare Puerto Rico to Hurricane Katrina based on how many people had died, implying what was happening in Puerto Rico wasn’t a “real catastrophe.”
“If you look at the — every death is a horror, but if you look at a real catastrophe like Katrina and you look at the tremendous hundreds and hundreds of people that died and what happened here with a storm that was just totally over bearing. No one has ever seen anything like that. What is your death count?"
"16," responded Governor Ricardo Rosselló.
"16 certified," Trump said, and then told all leaders assembled that they should all be "very proud."
The reality is that the death count is far higher, as my colleague Eliza Barclay has
noted. The situation is so bad in Puerto Rico that the government can't even issue death certificates to count the dead.
