Trump disputes Puerto Rico storm death toll, blames Democrats

Rossello officially updated the island’s death toll with the new information. “I trust that this process was carried out properly”, he said.

Co-host Abby Huntsman – new to the program – pushed back on Trump’s remarks, saying they were “indefensible” and “out of touch”, and that his response was reminiscent of the Bush administration’s approach to Hurricane Katrina in 2005. That led the cable news coverage that evening, further angering the president, according to one of the people.

The mayor of Puerto Rico’s capital says Trump is “delusional, paranoid, and unhinged from any sense of reality”. Locals could have been told to go pick up the water themselves and likely would have.

Trump’s administration is still facing blistering criticism for its response to Hurricane Maria, which left almost 3,000 dead, according to a George Washington University study.

Then on August 28, an epidemiological study by George Washington University commissioned by the island’s government concluded that 2,975 people were killed as a result of the storm.

The risk of dying during the storm or in its aftermath was 60 percent higher for Puerto Ricans living in the poorest areas, they found. The study’s midpoint estimate – 4,645 deaths – became a rallying cry for activists upset by what they see as a lack of accountability for the scale of the catastrophe by officials in Puerto Rico and the United States.

Earlier this week, Trump called his government’s response to the historic Puerto Rican disaster an “unsung success”.

“The water was kept in an area that was pretty hard hit during the storm, and could have used all the water they could have gotten”, Begnaud explained in a video he posted to Twitter.

Trump has eschewed any blame for the slow response to the island and the death of hundreds if not thousands of Americans, blaming Puerto Rico’s electrical grid.

But Trump, that official said, was unwilling to admit even internally that more needed to be done on the island.

“The President is telling lies to the world to cover up his abdication of duty to the people of Puerto Rico”, Cuomo said in a statement.

UPDATE: Gov. Rick Scott, Republican and candidate for U.S. Senate, has weighed in too.

Calculating death tolls from natural disasters is notoriously hard – death tolls are rarely mere tallies of names.

Ottmar Chavez, now administrator of Puerto Rico’s General Services Administration, said FEMA reported that it had about 20,000 pallets of bottled water in excess in May this year, before Chavez was appointed.

While the storm was directly and immediately responsible for a smaller number of deaths, an independent report placed the number of deaths blamed on the hurricane at 3,000.