Trump’s attack on San Juan’s Mayor Yulin Cruz this morning included a broader insult to people in Puerto Rico:
At 7:09 a.m., Trump wrote: “The Mayor of San Juan, who was very complimentary only a few days ago, has now been told by the Democrats that you must be nasty to Trump.”Seven minutes later, he wrote: “…Such poor leadership ability by the Mayor of San Juan, and others in Puerto Rico, who are not able to get their workers to help. They….”“…want everything to be done for them when it should be a community effort [bold mine-DL]. 10,000 Federal workers now on Island doing a fantastic job.”
Attacking a local official who is pleading for help in the middle of a major disaster would be a cruel and politically inept thing to do in any case, but Trump manages to make it worse by casting blame on the overall local response in the wake of what is generally acknowledged to be the worst disaster in Puerto Rico’s history. He accuses leaders in Puerto Rico and the population more generally of wanting “everything to be done for them” because one of their politicians criticized the federal government for an inadequate response to the disaster. That’s a contemptible response to legitimate criticism, and a disgraceful way to treat Americans who are going through one of the biggest disasters on record. Trump cannot excuse the lacking federal response by pointing to the scale of the disaster and then fault local officials for not doing enough, and it is obnoxious to suggest that the “community effort” has been insufficient when this is a disaster that he very publicly neglected for most of the last week.
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