“Great people.”Īsked by AP what he has to say to people still without power, food and water, he spoke of the generators brought to the island and said the electrical grid is being fixed. “There’s a lot of love in this room, a lot of love,” Trump said. At a table of supplies in a church, Trump tossed rolls of paper towels into the friendly crowd. In the upscale Guaynabo neighborhood, one of the fastest to recover, 200 people cheered Trump’s visit and crowded around him for cellphone photos. I think they finally understood.” In a tweet, she pointedly excluded the president as she credited his people with now understanding “the disconnect between how things are supposed to happen and how they really happen.”Īir Force One brought the president, first lady Melania Trump and aides to Puerto Rico for a tour stretching through the afternoon.Īt least parts of the itinerary were drawn to ensure a friendly reception: Trump visited the houses of selected families waiting on their lawns.
On a more positive note, Cruz said “I saw a real connection between the reality and the White House staff. “I would hope that the president of the United States stops spouting out comments that really hurt the people of Puerto Rico.” “Sometimes his style of communication gets in the way,” she told CNN. But his comment implying Maria was not a Katrina-level event left her unsure. Trump’s most prominent critic in Puerto Rico, San Juan Mayor Carmen Yulin Cruz, joined other officials at the air base for a briefing with him, shook the president’s hand and said afterward she hoped he now understood the gravity of the situation. “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 with, really, a storm that was just totally overpowering, nobody has ever seen anything like this.” He told local officials “you can be very proud of all your people, all of our people working together.”
Ricardo Rossello for “giving us the highest praise.” Trump said his visit was “not about me” but then praised local officials for offering kind words about his administration’s recovery effort and invited one to repeat the “nice things” she’d said earlier. And in Puerto Rico, in particular, his criticism of local people for not doing more to help themselves has struck an off note during a time of crisis. His effusive praise for federal relief efforts has overshadowed his displays of empathy for those who are suffering. The visit offered fresh evidence of the unconventional path Trump has taken in responding to the one-two-three punch from hurricanes Harvey, Irma and Maria. As for Katrina, as many as 1,800 people died in 2005 when levees protecting New Orleans broke, a toll in lives and property that took years to understand. But local officials caution that any accounting of death and destruction is far from complete as people suffer secondary effects from thirst, hunger and extreme heat without air conditioning. Trump pledged an all-out effort to help the island while adding, somewhat lightly, “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. “Nobody’s come,” said Ray Negron, 38, collecting debris in the Playita neighborhood. In the heart of San Juan, in fact, a few miles from the air base where Trump gave his thumbs-up report on progress, people stacked sewage-fouled clothes and mattresses outside houses and businesses lacking electricity nearly two weeks after the storm.
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