With Hurricane Florence bearing down on the Atlantic coast, Donald Trump took to Twitter Thursday morning to claim Puerto Rico’s official death toll from last year’s Hurricane Maria is incorrect and that Democrats engineered the higher casualty numbers—recently estimated to be nearly 3,000 people.
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
Naturally, the president—no stranger to conspiracy theories—shared his allegations without accompanying evidence.
Asked about Trump’s remarks, House Speaker Paul Ryan offered one of his standard reactions, devoid of criticism for the president. “Casualties don’t make a person look bad,” Ryan said during a press conference Thursday morning. “So I have no reason to dispute these numbers. I was in Puerto Rico after the hurricane — it was devastating. This was a horrible storm.”
Pressed on whether Trump should apologize for his comments, Ryan dodged the question and reiterated that damage caused by the hurricane last year is “no one’s fault.” Others, such as Florida Republican Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, were more willing to condemn the president. “It might be a new low,” Ros-Lehtinen said Thursday morning, adding that Trump has “a warped mind that would turn this statistic into fake news.”
“How could you be so self-centered and try to distort the truth so much?” she asked.
And Florida Senate candidate Rick Scott was compelled to differ with Trump’s position. “I’ve been to Puerto Rico 7 times & saw devastation firsthand,” he wrote.
Trump was referring to an independent study commissioned by the governor of Puerto Rico and carried out by George Washington University, which estimated at the end of August that 2,975 people died from September 2017 through February 2018 as a result of the storm. That figure represents a 22 percent increase from the number of deaths that would have been expected had the hurricane not occurred.
Shortly after the study was released, the Puerto Rican government accepted GW’s estimate, a massive shift from its previous tally of just 64 deaths. Trump argues that the federal government’s response to Hurricane Maria was a success, although a recent report from the Government Accountability Office indicates FEMA’s approach was flawed.
GAO reported that more than half of federal emergency response workers who were sent to Puerto Rico in the aftermath of the storm were not qualified to do their jobs. Additionally, the report said, FEMA did not have enough bilingual employees, and the agency was overwhelmed with previous disasters including Hurricane Harvey and wildfires out West.
These added to logistical challenges concerning the location and nature of the island. GAO wrote that local recovery efforts were hampered by damage caused by prior hurricanes, the Puerto Rican government’s “limited local preparedness for a major hurricane,” and extensive communications and power outages. Power was only restored on the island last month, and it remains vulnerable.
Hurricane Florence is expected to make landfall in the Carolinas overnight and is expected to bring heavy winds, flooding, and other life-threatening conditions to the region.
