President Trump said Thursday that 3,000 people did not die in Puerto Rico in the two hurricanes that hit the island last year, and claimed that Democrats were inflating the number in an effort to make him look bad.
“3000 people did not die in the two hurricanes that hit Puerto Rico,” Trump tweeted Thursday morning. “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.”
Trump blamed Democrats for inflating the number in an effort to argue that he handled the situation in Puerto Rico poorly.
“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,” Trump tweeted. “If a person died for any reason, like old age, just add them onto the list. Bad politics. I love Puerto Rico!”
[Related: Trump says feds succeeded in Puerto Rico despite ‘totally incompetent’ San Juan mayor]
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
Puerto Rico kept an early count of people who died when Hurricanes Irma and Maria hit last year. But the government stopped counting after a few days, when the death toll was 64, and then commissioned George Washington University to do a study on the number of casualties resulting from the storm.
At the end of August 2018, the study concluded that 2,975 people had perished in the six months following the hurricanes. An earlier study from Harvard made similar conclusions that things like power outages and related interruptions to the healthcare system on the island resulted in 4,600 deaths related to the hurricanes in the months following the storms.
Trump sent the tweets as his administration is preparing for Hurricane Florence to strike the East Coast. The also came a day after reports that a giant cache of water bottles had been discovered at an airport runway in Puerto Rico. The water had gone bad as it waited to be distributed to victims of last year’s hurricane.
Trump this week claimed that the government’s response to Hurricane Maria was “incredibly successful.”
