President Donald Trump on Thursday insisted the death toll for Hurricane Maria is less than thousands of victims acknowledged by the Puerto Rican government and blamed Democrats for the allegedly inflated figure.
"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 3,000," Trump tweeted, referring to his only visit to the island in wake of hurricanes Irma and Maria.
"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!"
San Juan's Democratic Mayor Carmen Yulin Cruz, who pleaded with Trump for additional aid amid the storms, fired back in a tweet Thursday morning, holding up Trump as an example of "what denial following neglect looks like."
"Mr. Pres in the real world people died on your watch," she wrote. "YOUR LACK OF RESPECT IS APPALLING."
House Democrats echoed the sentiment.
"President Trump won't acknowledge the thousands of Americans who died on his watch," reads a tweet from their official Twitter account. "And even worse, Republicans have no interest in holding this administration accountable and ensuring that Congress is prepared to respond to these disasters."
The president has consistently applauded the response to Hurricane Maria, which battered Puerto Rico last year, despite the steady climb in deaths and revised estimates. Puerto Rican officials changed Hurricane Maria's official death toll from 64 to 2,975 following a government-commissioned study earlier this year.
The massive storm knocked out power to the entire U.S. territory _ electricity was not restored to every customer on the island until only a few weeks ago and Puerto Rico still faces billions in repairs.
FEMA also admitted to shortcomings in its response in its after-action report released in July, which summarizes its performance in 2017. The agency faced three catastrophic hurricanes last year, two of them in Puerto Rico.
"FEMA leadership acknowledged the Agency could have better anticipated that the severity of hurricanes Irma and Maria would cause long-term, significant damage to the territories' infrastructure," the report reads.
"Leadership also recognized the emergency managers at all levels could have better leveraged existing information to proactively plan for and address such challenges, both before and immediately after the hurricanes."
Despite that, the president called his administration's work in Puerto Rico an "unsung success" Wednesday and boasted a strong response to recent storms.
"We got A pluses for our recent hurricane work in Texas and Florida (and did an unappreciated job in Puerto Rico, even though an inaccessible island with very poor electricity and a totally incompetent Mayor of San Juan," he tweeted.
Cruz, during an appearance on MSNBC on Wednesday said the president "doesn't understand that this isn't about him and about his ego.
"This is about the inability of his administration, that he directs, to ensure that the appropriate help got to Puerto Rico in time."
