Culture

Trump Lashes Out At The Mayor Of San Juan Over Puerto Rico’s Recovery: ‘They Want Everything To Be Done For Them’


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Following a Friday rife with public pleas for help and criticisms of the Trump administration’s lackluster response by San Juan Mayor Carmen Yulín Cruz, Donald Trump spent Saturday morning responding with a string of nasty tweets about Puerto Rico. “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,” 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”:

After his initial attack on Cruz and, apparently, pretty much anyone in the Puerto Rican government and local community, he segued into several tweets and retweets praising or highlighting the “10,000 Federal workers now on Island doing a fantastic job.” “The military and first responders, despite no electric, roads, phones,” Trump continued, “have done an amazing job. Puerto Rico was totally destroyed.”

Before calling it a morning and presumably heading out to shoot a few rounds of golf at his private club in Bedminster, New Jersey, the president dedicated a few final tweets to his favorite target: fake news. “Fake News CNN and NBC are going out of their way to disparage our great First Responders,” he wrote. Trump also managed to squeeze in yet another reminder of his planned trip to Puerto Rico on Tuesday:


To her credit, Cruz chose not to respond directly to the president’s tweeted criticisms. In fact, she didn’t even mention him or his office when she accompanied several photos with the line: “The goal is one: saving lives. This is the time to show our ‘true colors’. We cannot be distracted by anything else”:

CBS News reporter David Begnaud, who’s been on the ground in Puerto Rico covering the devastation and the response, posted a short video responding to Trump’s tweets with his own experiences. “The community has been doing as much as they can do,” he said. “People were running out of food and running out of water, so neighbors were sharing rice and the water that they did have left”:

Meanwhile, the majority of those who responded to Trump’s tweeted attacks were unsurprisingly forthright. Especially Hamilton creator Lin-Manuel Miranda, whose extended family hails from Puerto Rico. Though he initially praised the president for finally waiving the Jones Act so that aid could flow freely into port, his opinion Saturday morning was decidedly different:


Others quickly followed with similar reactions:


UPDATE: Mayor Cruz appeared on MSNBC Saturday morning, at which point host Joy Reid asked her about Trump’s tweets. She clarified that none of her previous comments and complaints ever mentioned the president directly. She also noted that Lt. Gen. Jeffrey Buchanan, who was appointed to head rescue and relief efforts, had previously made similar remarks. “This isn’t about me. This isn’t about anyone. This is about lives that are being lost,” she said.