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White House defends Trump on Puerto Rico death toll claim
By CATHERINE LUCEY, ZEKE MILLER and JONATHAN LEMIRE, Associated Press
WASHINGTON (AP) — As Hurricane Florence bore down on the U.S., President Donald Trump angrily churned up the dev- astating storm of a year earlier, disputing the official death count from Hurricane Maria and falsely accusing Democrats of inflating the Puerto Rican toll to make him “look as bad as possible.”
Public health experts have estimated that nearly 3,000 perished because of the effects of Maria. But Trump, whose efforts to help the island territory recover have been persistently criticized, was having none of that Thursday. He said just six to 18 people had been re- ported dead when he visited two weeks after the storm and suggested that many had been added later “if a person died for any reason, like old age.”
Trump’s jarring comments, coming as the East Coast braced for the massive storm, which later made landfall early Friday in North Carolina, offered fresh evidence of his resis- tance to criticism and his insistence on viewing large and small events through the prism of his own success or failure.
Offering up a fresh conspiracy theory, he said of the Puerto Rico count, “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.”
Even some Republicans suggested the presi- dent had gone too far.
“Casualties don’t make a person look bad,” House Speaker Paul Ryan said, breaking with the president. “So I have no reason to dispute those numbers.”
Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, who talks to Trump often, said, “I don’t think it’s bad to say we could have done better in Puerto Rico.” He also said he thought Trump “sees every attack on him as sort of undercut- ting his legitimacy.”
Especially upset were GOP politicians in Florida, a state with a substantial Puerto Rican population.
Gov. Rick Scott, who is running for the U.S. Senate, tweeted: “I’ve been to Puerto Rico 7 times & saw devastation firsthand. The loss of
any life is tragic.” A spokesman for former U.S. Rep. Ron DeSantis, who won the Florida GOP primary for governor with Trump’s support, said he did not agree with Trump’s tweets.
The White House defended the president.
“As the President said, every death from Hurricane Maria is a horror. Before, during, and after the two massive hurricanes, the President directed the entire Administration to provide unprecedented support to Puerto Rico,” White House spokesman Hogan Gidley said. “President Trump was responding to the liberal media and the San Juan Mayor who sadly, have tried to exploit the devastation by pushing out a constant stream of misinforma- tion and false accusations.”
Gidley cited studies that attributed fewer than 3,000 deaths on the island to Maria.
Throughout his presidency, Trump has struggled to publicly express empathy at times of national crises, sparking outrage during his post-Maria visit when he feuded with San Juan Mayor Carmen Yulin Cruz and tossed out paper towels to victims like he was shooting baskets. In recent days, Trump publicly lauded his own administration’s response to Maria and privately groused over storm-related
news coverage that he saw as overly focused on Puerto Rico, according to two Republican advisers close to the White House who weren’t authorized to speak publicly.
Puerto Rico’s governor last month raised Maria’s official death toll from 64 to 2,975 after an independent study found that the number of people who succumbed in the sweltering aftermath had been severely undercounted. Trump dismissed the findings Thursday, tweeting: “If a person died for any reason, like old age, just add them onto the list.”
In fact, there are two categories of disaster deaths. “Direct” deaths include such fatali-
ties as drownings in a storm surge or being crushed in a wind-toppled building. “Indirect” deaths are harder to count because they can include such things as heart attacks, electro- cutions from downed power lines and failure to receive dialysis because the power is out — and those kinds of fatalities can happen after a storm has ended but while an area is struggling to restore electricity, clean water and other
health and safety services.
When Trump visited in October 2017, two
weeks after the storm hit, the death toll at
the time was indeed 16 people. The number was later raised to 64, but the government then commissioned an independent study to determine how many died because of post- storm conditions. That study — conducted by the Milken Institute School of Public Health at George Washington University — estimated 2,975 deaths.
Dr. Carlos Santos-Burgoa — the lead re- searcher on the study and a well-known expert in global health, particularly Latin America — told The Associated Press that the initial figure of 64 deaths reflected only people whose death certificates cited the storm. He said the latest figure was more accurate and stressed that every death in the six months following the storm was not attributed to the hurricane.
“We are scientists. We are public health people. We are committed to the health of the population. We try to reach the truth, and we try to understand what is damaging the people in order to prevent disease,” he said.
Puerto Rico’s government is run by the New Progressive party, a pro-statehood, Puerto Ri- co-only party. Gov. Ricardo Rossello told CBS New York on Thursday that he was a Demo- crat but stressed that the government sought the study and said it “tried to make this process a completely independent process.”
State and local officials are responsible for establishing death tolls, not the federal gov- ernment. After the total was revised Aug. 28, White House spokeswoman Sarah Huckabee Sanders issued a statement in which she did not actively dispute the revised figure.
Trump maintained as recently as Tuesday that his response to the storm was an “incredi- ble unsung success.”
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Associated Press reporters Colleen Long, Lauran Neergaard and Alan Fram in Wash- ington, Danica Coto in San Juan, Puerto Rico, Michael Weissenstein in Havana, Cuba, and Jennifer Peltz in New York contributed to this report.
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