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Conrad Duncan
Aug 28, 2019
Donald Trump is complaining about Puerto Rico being in the path of another natural disaster.
In September 2017, the US territory was hit by Hurricane Maria – a devastating storm which caused more than $90bn in damage and killed an estimated 3,000 people (according to research from 2018).
The Trump administration’s response to the crisis was widely-criticised as “slow and inadequate”, leading to an ugly public feud between the president and San Juan’s mayor, Carmen Yulin Cruz.
When the revised death toll was released in 2018, Trump rejected the figure and accused Democratic politicians of inflating the number of fatalities to “make [him] look as bad as possible”.
Now, Puerto Rico is facing another potential hurricane – currently called Tropical Storm Dorian – and Trump is frustrated that the island is expected to need his help again.
On Twitter, Trump wrote:
Firstly, the $92bn figure Trump quoted is false as Puerto Rico has only been allocated roughly $42bn in federal disaster relief and has seen about $14bn so far.
It is also very clearly not an "all-time record".
And secondly, what is he even trying to say?
The Atlantic hurricane season happens every year and it’s not particularly unusual for Puerto Rico to be hit by extreme weather – although Maria was an exceptionally bad example.
Some people picked up on the implication that Trump was blaming Puerto Rico for having “yet another” storm.
It’s hard to know exactly what Trump is trying to say with this – especially as his tweets are often just an incoherent stream of consciousness – but at the very least, his first response to another potentially devastating natural disaster is to complain about the amount of money it’s going to cost.
The tweet also shows that his long-running feud with Puerto Rico is unlikely to end any time soon.
Mayor Cruz was definitely not impressed with his response...
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