Hurricane Florence is affecting my life, too: all the weather news means I have to watch twice as much MSNBC to get my RDA (Recommended Daily Allowance) of JTDS (Justifiable Trump Derangement Syndrome). Luckily, the president is intruding on the current hurricane news by tweeting about last year's hurricane in Puerto Rico, an ongoing catastrophe. It's as if he's determined to give all the journalistic "haters" an excuse to rerun the footage of him flipping rolls of paper towels into the crowd of Puerto Ricans.
A few days ago, Trump called his administration's hurricane response in Puerto Rico an "incredible, unsung success." This buoyant assessment arouses a familiar sensation of cognitive dissonance when considered alongside the conclusion of an independent study, by researchers at George Washington University's Milken School of Public Health, placing the death toll at 2,975--by chance, a near match for the number of Americans killed in the 9/11 attacks, the anniversary of which was marked a couple of days before Trump began tweeting about Puerto Rico again:
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
It was not "the Democrats," of course, but the conclusions of public health researchers at George Washington U that are to blame for the president's embarrassment. When the evidence is against you, put someone else on trial. The "after" in all capital letters shows that Trump subscribes to a theory, advanced by social media bots and perhaps breathing MAGA types, too, concerning how Trump Derangement Syndrome has so poisoned the minds of the afflicted that they are now blaming the president for weather disasters. When he flew out of Puerto Rico, there had been by his report only a dozen deaths, give or take a half dozen, and that was AFTER the hurricane, so obviously the report of almost 3,000 deaths is fake news intended to make him look bad. He's being blamed for the deaths of octogenarians in Puerto Rico!
That seems to be what the president is saying and, as usual, he's got it all wrong. No one is blaming the Trump administration for the comparatively few people who perished when, for example, they were drowned in rising water as the storm raged. A relief effort is evaluated by how well it mitigates human suffering in the days, weeks, and months after the terrible event. Is it possible Trump doesn't understand this? It seems so, because he left AFTER the storm, and fewer than twenty were dead. It's impossible that a couple dozen hundred people or more might die of the effects of compromised public infrastructure--no drinking water, no power (which means, for example, no air conditioning in Puerto Rico), no ambulance service, all the normal services that people rely on disrupted by this cataclysm and barely any improvement for days, weeks, months afterwards.
What is the part about him raising Billions of Dollars to rebuild Puerto Rico? We pay taxes and the federal government has the needed resources. Effective, efficient execution is the challenge, and, on the evidence, it was a fail.
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