Confronting Puerto Rico's devastation nearly two weeks after Hurricane Maria, President Donald Trump highlighted the island's relatively low death toll compared with "a real catastrophe like Katrina" as he opened a tour of the island Tuesday by focusing on the best of the reviews he and his administration are getting for the federal response.
Trump pledged an all-out effort to help the island but added:
Now I hate to tell you, Puerto Rico, but you’ve thrown our budget a little out of whack because we’ve spent a lot of money on Puerto Rico. And that’s fine. We’ve saved a lot of lives.
He said his visit was "not about me" but then praised local officials for offering kind words about the recovery effort and invited one to repeat the "nice things" she'd said earlier.
“Every death is a horror,” he said, “but if you look at a real catastrophe like Katrina and you look at the tremendous, hundreds of and hundreds and hundreds of people that died, and you look at what happened here ... nobody’s ever seen anything like this.”
In Washington, Rep. Luis Gutierrez, D-Ill., noted that many people in more remote areas still in dire straits and in need of food and water. He told CNN, "Let's stop talking about the death count until this is over."
The most prominent critic in Puerto Rico, San Juan Mayor Carmen Yulin Cruz, attended Trump's first event, in an airport hangar, shaking Trump's hand as he went around a table greeting officials before sitting in in the shadow of a hulking, gray military plane.
"How are you?" he asked. Her response could not be heard. He thanked her. Days earlier, Cruz said the Trump administration was "killing us with the inefficiency," pleading for more effective federal leadership in the crisis.
(This story has been edited for length)
(At The Quint, we are answerable only to our audience. Play an active role in shaping our journalism by becoming a member. Because the truth is worth it.)