EDITORIAL: The President & the storm: Trump’s self-congratulatory grade of his Hurricane Maria response vs. reality
And that may well have contributed to the carnage by diminishing the sense of urgency in the rescue and recovery operations.
A Harvard study out this week surveyed 3,300 randomly chosen households across the island to produce an independent estimate of casualties caused by Hurricane Maria from
The official government death toll is 64. It's a vast lowball, as experts and independent media analysts have long been insisting, due to the arcane and restrictive way
Trump, who scoffs at government data when it doesn't suit his purposes (see: illegal voting totals), bought the double-digit fatality total hook, line and sinker.
On his visit to
(Katrina's death total in
Trump, tossing paper towels, went on to tout what was at that point the formal figure, 16, "versus literally thousands of people," telling federal and local personnel gathered "everybody around this table and everybody watching can really be very proud of what's taken place in
That, even though authorities took months to get the island's power infrastructure, which had been frayed before the storm and was torn apart after it, mostly back online.
That, even though critics were in real time assailing the Trump administration for being sluggish to move military assets to Puerto Rican ports -- just 7,200
The number of meal kits, water and workers sent in the days after the storm paled in comparison to those that flooded the zone in
No expert estimate can quantify how Trump's happy talk might have exacerbated the depths of the devastation.
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