Puerto Rico: Trump is ‘miscommunicator in chief’, says mayor
Media playback is unsupported on your device Media captionPuerto Rico isn’t a “real catastrophe like Katrina”
The mayor of Puerto Rico’s capital, San Juan, has described Donald Trump’s visit to the hurricane-hit island as “insulting” and called him a “miscommunicator-in-chief”.
Mayor Carmen Yulin Cruz described his televised meeting with officials as a “PR, 17-minute meeting”.
The sight of him throwing paper towels to people in the crowd was “terrible and abominable”, she added.
Mr Trump tweeted it had been a “great day” in Puerto Rico.
But he also took another swipe at the reporting of his trip.
Skip Twitter post by @realDonaldTrump
A great day in Puerto Rico yesterday. While some of the news coverage is Fake, most showed great warmth and friendship.
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) October 4, 2017 Report
End of Twitter post by @realDonaldTrump
Tuesday’s five-hour presidential trip to San Juan came two weeks after Hurricane Maria devastated the island, and followed complaints that the US government’s handling of the storm’s aftermath was too slow.
Only 7% of the island has power and more remote parts of the island – a US territory – have been without food, water and basic medical aid.
Before landing on the island, Mr Trump graded his own administration’s response as an “A-plus”.
Media playback is unsupported on your device Media caption’Why did it take nine days for help to arrive?’
During his televised meeting with emergency responders and officials of Puerto Rico, he went out of his way to praise – and seek compliments for – the federal response.
“Every death is a horror,” the president said, “but if you look at a real catastrophe like Katrina, and you look at the tremendous – hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of people that died, and you look at what happened here, with really a storm that was just totally overpowering, nobody’s ever seen anything like this.”
He then turned to the governor of Puerto Rico, Ricardo Rosello, and asked how many people had died in the storm.
“Seventeen? Sixteen people certified, 16 people versus in the thousands,” Mr Trump said, referring to the 2005 hurricane that killed 1,833 people in New Orleans.
Governor Rosello later clarified that the number of people in Puerto Rico killed by Maria had increased to 34.
Mr Trump also pointed to the impact of the cost of storm recovery on US domestic spending, which was already facing a budget shortfall of $72bn (£54bn), telling Puerto Ricans “you’ve thrown our budget a little out of whack… but that’s fine”.
After his meeting, he toured in and around San Juan, stopping at a church to hand out relief supplies and throwing paper towels into the crowd.
At one point he reportedly glanced at a pile of solar-powered flashlights and – apparently unaware of the ongoing power problems – said “you don’t need ’em anymore”, the Washington Post reports.
Image copyright Getty Images Image caption Critics said Mr Trump throwing products out to a crowd resembled a promotional giveaway at a US sports game
Mayor Carmen Yulin Cruz told MSNBC after the visit that his meeting with officials had been a PR exercise in which “there was no exchange with anybody, with none of the mayors”.
She went on to say: “This terrible and abominable view of him throwing paper towels and throwing provisions at people, it really – it does not embody the spirit of the American nation, you know?”
She said his comments about throwing the US budget out of whack were “insulting to the people of Puerto Rico”, and his comparisons with Katrina “minimised our suffering”.
“Well you know what? They are dying. They don’t have the medical resources,” she pointed out.
Ms Cruz said he had become “sort of like miscommunicator-in-chief” who showed no interest in reaching out to those who were suffering. But she went on to say “his staff, on the other hand, seemed to want to approach this a different way”.
She tweeted after the meeting:
Skip Twitter post by @CarmenYulinCruz
Meeting with WH staff productive. They REALLY understood the disconnect between how things are supposed to happen and how they really happen
— Carmen Yulín Cruz (@CarmenYulinCruz) October 3, 2017 Report
End of Twitter post by @CarmenYulinCruz
Ms Cruz had been called a poor leader by President Trump in a tweet at the weekend after she accused his administration of “killing us with the inefficiency”.
On Tuesday, she shook hands with him and told him: “It’s about saving lives, it’s not about politics”. He did not respond.
Image copyright Getty Images Image caption Mayor Carmen Yulin Cruz and Mr Trump shake hands
Following the visit, the White House announced it was preparing to send a $29bn (£22bn) disaster aid request to Congress.
Of that, $13bn would be for hurricane victims in Puerto Rico, Florida and Texas, while the other $16bn would be for the government-backed flood insurance programme.
