As Hurricane Florence heads toward the East Coast, President Trump tweeted that “3000 people did not die in the two hurricanes that hit Puerto Rico.” He then added, “This was done by the Democrats in order to make me look as bad as possible.”
In these callous tweets the president is haggling over those who died in the aftermath of a hurricane – many of which can and should have been prevented – as if they were numbers of viewers at his inauguration.
That figure that the president disputes, while perhaps not as clear as the photos that easily disproved his claims to inauguration attendance (despite attempts to doctor them), is nonetheless still good data. The statistic itself, 2,975 dead, came not from Democrats, but instead from analysis produced by George Washington University that compared death rates before and after the storm for a period of six months.
If you’re interested in the methodology of that study (it’s quite sound) you can read it here. The death toll numbering in the thousands is also corroborated by a Harvard study which put the number at 4,645 additional deaths attributed to the storm in the three months after it hit.
[Also read: Twitter rips Trump for claiming Puerto Rico death toll was inflated, devised by Democrats]
Although that study does not identify specifically how each excess death occurred, many were due to failures of disaster response after the storm including prolonged lack of health care, lack of electricity, lack of clean water and other management failures – like the 20,000 pallets of water bottles left to rot at the airport.
As for the initial numbers, cited by Trump – those were so low because the local government literally gave up trying to count the number of dead in the aftermath of the storm – which is why, yes, months later, after careful statistical analysis was complete, a clearer understanding of the impact of the storm emerged.
That the federal response was disastrous has been openly acknowledged by FEMA in its after-action report where the agency said it was ill prepared from the devastation after two other major storms hit the United States in the same season.
For the president to cling to his need to be praised, even when faced with clear evidence that the federal response to Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico was not a success and then to dispute the number of reported dead as if arguing that a little statistical wiggle room exonerates him and his administration, needlessly politicizes the disaster.
Worse, it means that the president would rather cover up a failure than work to improve federal disaster response.
As the country faces what is already shaping up to likely be another devastating hurricane season as Florence heads towards the Carolinas, Americans need to look to the government lead and improve disaster response, not haggle over numbers to deny that there is a problem while blaming the other party.
Disasters impact all Americans and supporting victims must be a bipartisan and apolitical effort.
