Trump's continued indolent response to Hurricane Maria is our worst fears about him come true [View all]

[DonViejo]

Almost 3,000 dead and he says, “We did a fantastic job.”

By Matthew Yglesias@[e-mail] Aug 29, 2018, 4:30pm EDT

Speaking to reporters briefly at the White House, Donald Trump repeated the most consequential of the many lies of his presidency — that the federal government did a “fantastic job” in its response to last year’s Hurricane Maria catastrophe that killed nearly 3,000 people in Puerto Rico.

Link to tweet

That’s a line that Trump has maintained ever since he made a belated visit to the island after two straight weekends golfing, followed by the observation that “it’s been incredible the results that we’ve had with respect to loss of life.”

In fact, the results they had with respect to the loss of life were awful. Awful in terms of the sheer number of dead, but also awful in terms of the reluctance from the very beginning to deliver an accurate death count. That the disaster turned out to be deadlier even than Hurricane Katrina is shocking, and the fact that it took the government until this week to finally acknowledge that fact is an entirely separate shock. And it’s a reminder that while Trump’s time in office has shown that the macroeconomy can remain remarkably robust in the face of a president who has no idea what he’s doing, there are other aspects of national affairs where this is not the case.

Trump is a president who can’t even properly execute a relatively simple presidential task like leading the national mourning for the late Sen. John McCain in an appropriate way. Faced with something genuinely difficult like a strong hurricane hitting an island whose electrical infrastructure was already in rocky shape, he just totally failed with catastrophic consequences.

Trump’s instinct from Day 1 has been to simply turn the island’s devastation into another front in culture-war politics, a strategy that has helped keep his political career alive despite his lack of substantive command of the job.

more
https://www.vox.com/2018/8/29/17797466/trump-hurricane-maria-puerto-rico-response-death-toll