Trump lashes out at Puerto Rico officials from his golf club, tweets that Puerto Ricans “want everything to be done for them”

Desdemona Despair

By Matthew Nussbaum And Marc Caputo
30 September 2017

(Politico) – President Donald Trump attacked the mayor of San Juan, Puerto Rico, on Saturday, writing on Twitter that she and other leaders on the storm-ravaged territory “want everything to be done for them.”

Trump’s early morning broadsides came after San Juan Mayor Carmen Yulín Cruz slammed the administration’s response repeatedly on Friday amid growing media coverage of the devastation caused by Hurricane Maria.

“We are dying here,” Cruz said in an emotional plea on Friday. “If anybody out there is listening to us, we are dying, and you are killing us with the inefficiency and the bureaucracy.”

Her plea and others like it have led critics to liken Trump’s response to that of George W. Bush in New Orleans after Katrina struck that city a decade ago.

In his latest fight with an opponent few other politicians would engage — waged from his Bedminster, New Jersey, golf club — Trump dismissed Cruz as a partisan.

“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,” Trump wrote on Twitter. “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.”

Trump added that the Puerto Ricans “want everything to be done for them when it should be a community effort. 10,000 Federal workers now on Island doing a fantastic job.”

Cruz responded in an MSNBC interview Saturday, dismissing Trump’s criticisms and saying she had no time for “distractions.”

“I am not going to be distracted by small comments, by politics, by petty issues,” she said, insisting her criticism of Trump had not been motivated by partisanship.

“Actually, I was asking for help,” she said. “I wasn’t saying anything nasty about the president. But don’t take my word for it, General Buchanan, a three star general has said as one of the first comments he’s made about the Puerto Rico situation that he doesn’t have enough troops and he doesn’t have enough equipment of what he needs to get the situation under control.” [more]

Trump lashes out at Puerto Rico officials