A former top aide to President Trump said the commander in chief lacked “empathy” this week when he touted his administration’s response to Hurricane Maria, which devastated nearly all of Puerto Rico last summer, as an “unsung success.”
“The missing part was empathy,” Tom Bossert, who served as White House Homeland Security adviser until he was forced out in April, told the New York Times in an interview published Thursday.
During an Oval Office briefing Wednesday about preparations for Hurricane Florence, the president told reporters he was proud of his administration’s “incredibly successful” response to Puerto Rico, which he said was “tough” to help due to the island’s crumbling infrastructure and location.
“It was one of the best jobs that’s ever been done with respect to what this is all about,” Trump had said.
The president then claimed in a pair of tweets Thursday morning that his political opponents were deliberately inflating the death count from Hurricane Maria to “make me look as bad as possible.”
“3000 people did not die in the two hurricanes that hit Puerto Rico,” he wrote. “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. 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.”
Bossert’s criticism came a day before Trump penned the controversial tweets. He affirmed in his comments to the Times that the death toll from Hurricane Maria was somewhere in the thousands, but acknowledged that some deaths might have been “correlative, and not necessarily causal.”
“The people that died — thousands of people — it’s terrible, but it’s always difficult to talk about the causality of that death,” Bossert said.
Trump drew severe backlash on Thursday for downplaying the estimated death toll in Puerto Rico. Some claimed his comments made him unfit to serve, while others accused him of denying reality.
[Related: Twitter rips Trump for claiming Puerto Rico death toll was inflated, devised by Democrats]
Amid the latest controversy sparked by the president’s tweets, the administration is preparing for a Category 2 hurricane to hit the East Coast with torrential rain and heavy winds over the weekend.
