WASHINGTON _ President Donald Trump warned those in Hurricane Florence's path of the storm's power, but then returned to attacking his foes and painting himself as the victim of an internal FBI scheme to damage him politically. And he essentially accused Puerto Rican officials and Democrats of lying about how many people died there after Hurricane Maria pummeled the island.
Florence is churning off the North Carolina coast and has been downgraded to a Category 2 hurricane, but federal weather analysts warn it soon will dump potential record levels of rain on the Carolinas. Despite the downgrade, the president tweeted Thursday morning that Florence only "gets even larger and more powerful. Be careful!"
Trump shoehorned a presidential statement about the hurricane in between Twitter attacks on banker Jamie Dimon and current and former FBI agents he contends tried during the 2016 campaign to wreck his White House bid.
Even as it appeared millions of Americans soon would feel Florence's wrath and face significant damage to their property, electrical outages of possibly weeks and other hardships, the president that former White House chief strategist Steve Bannon calls a "street fighter" was brawling with Dimon.
The banker on Wednesday said he could defeat Trump in a general election but would be unlikely to win over liberal Democrats in a primary. If Dimon was out to get a rise out of the president, he succeeded.
Trump lashed out on Twitter, writing that Dimon "doesn't have the aptitude or 'smarts' & is a poor public speaker & nervous mess _ otherwise he is wonderful."
"I've made a lot of bankers, and others, look much smarter than they are with my great economic policy!" he wrote.
Then came the brief, by comparison, hurricane warning tweet: "We are completely ready for hurricane Florence, as the storm gets even larger and more powerful. Be careful!"
Then it was back on the offensive, calling text messages traded during the campaign by former FBI agent Peter Strzok and Lisa Page while they were romantically linked a "disaster and embarrassment to the FBI & DOJ," adding the episode "should never have happened but we are learning more and more by the hour.
For the second time this week, Trump did not mask that he was responding to Fox News programming, quoting anchor Gregg Jarrett who contended others inside the bureau were "leaking like mad" to take down candidate Trump.
A tweet after those that suggested Florence's approach conjuring the Maria aftermath on Puerto Rico has gotten under the president's skin.
Trump claimed that after his paper towel-throwing visit to the U.S. territory after Maria has passed, "they had anywhere from 6 to 18 deaths."
He claimed that "3000 people did not die," writing that "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..."
Trump earlier this week called his administration's response on Puerto Rico an "unsung" success, prompting the ire of Democratic lawmakers.
"The people of Puerto Rico were left without electricity for almost a year. They suffered greatly in the aftermath of Hurricane Maria," Senate Minority Whip Richard J. Durbin of Illinois tweeted. "The President has forgotten the obvious, and he shouldn't be bragging about the response to that hurricane."
It was Durbin and other Democrats, in Trump's mind, who are responsible for the higher death toll figures. He fired off another tweet contending Democrats inflated the numbers "to make me look as bad as possible when I was successfully raising Billions of Dollars to help rebuild Puerto Rico."
He accused Democrats and Puerto Rican officials of driving up the death toll by adding deaths due to "any reason, like old age."
He ended that tweet with a remark that likely will bring angry responses from Democrats and Puerto Rican officials: "I love Puerto Rico!"
