Donald Trump Appreciates The Congrats On Tremendous Job He's Doing In Puerto Rico!

Everything's so beautiful and there are no icky brown people wanting to touch me

Puerto Rico was hit by Hurricane Maria over a week ago, and the island's power grid needs to be completely rebuilt. Roads are still impassable. Hospitals are running out of fuel to keep their generators running and patients alive, and at least two people in Intensive Care at a San Juan hospital died in the first days when the generators failed and so did their life support. There are thousands of shipping containers full of food and clean water and other supplies sitting on the docks of San Juan, because there aren't enough drivers, not enough trucks, uncertainty about whether roads are open, and in the case of refrigerated containers, no guarantee that (if trucks make it through) there will be any operating freezers or refrigerators for goods to be offloaded into. After over a week, the Army finally got a general on the ground Thursday to begin coordinating the relief effort.

Why did it take eight days to fly in a general to Puerto Rico? Donald Trump's top homeland security adviser Tom Bossert had a great explanation for that at a presser Thursday: "It didn't require a three-star general eight days ago."

As far too many people have pointed out, Hurricane Maria and Puerto Rico would be Donald Trump's Katrina, at least if Trump were being held to the same standard as George W. Bush or any relatively normal president. Russel Honore, the general Bush sent to New Orleans to finally fix the government's fuckups, told Bloomberg Politics Trump was screwing the disaster-relief pooch bigly:

"It’s kind of like Katrina: We got it. We got it. Oh, s--t, send in the cavalry," Honore, now retired from the military, said in an interview Wednesday. "This is a hit on White House decision making" [...]

Only the military has the ability to move supplies quickly onto the island as many ports remain closed, he said -- what he called "expeditionary logistics," a mix of specialized ships, aircraft and other equipment that the National Guard can’t match. Before the storm hit, the federal government should have positioned more personnel in Puerto Rico, he said.

Oh, now that's just nuts! How could anyone have known there'd be a disaster if the island were hit by a category-5 hurricane? Global warming isn't real, and Donald Trump was busy yelling at football players.

Thankfully, Donald Trump knows how to fix Puerto Rico now:  Whine that the media is being mean to him. It's really perfectly obvious, he explained on Twitter yesterday:

Still, some people seem to think maybe the president might have noticed 3.5 million people in distress a bit sooner, even if they were way out in the middle of an ocean! How can you hope to respond quickly to some place that has suffered a massive natural disaster if it's way out in the middle of an ocean? IT CANNOT BE DONE. Unless maybe you're talking about getting help to Haiti after it was hit by an earthquake in 2010. Somehow, Barack Obama managed to mobilize the US military and get troops and supplies on the way to Port-au-Prince the day after the earthquake (probably because he was born there):

Before dawn the next morning, an Army unit was airborne, on its way to seize control of the main airport in Port-au-Prince.Within two days, the Pentagon had 8,000 American troops en route. Within two weeks, 33 U.S. military ships and 22,000 troops had arrived. More than 300 military helicopters buzzed overhead, delivering millions of pounds of food and water.

As of Thursday, about 4,400 troops were helping in Puerto Rico, along with another thousand Coast Guard members. After Hillary Clinton yelled at him, Trump finally dispatched the hospital ship USNS Comfort to the island -- it could have been sent sooner, but maybe nobody told Trump we have "hospital ships."

The island of Vieques, seven miles east of Puerto Rico, was hit first by Maria, and it's in terrible shape:  no power, no gasoline, no running water, and 9,000 people desperate for help. It has received one shipment of gasoline since the hurricane, and the island's one hospital is almost out of fuel to run its main generator (the backup generator was stolen, so if any of the 18 dialysis patients die due to a power failure, Trump can at least blame it on the inherent criminality of those Mexicans in Puerto Rico).

Oh, but not all the news is bad. Trump tweeted this morning that Wall Street's doing GREAT! MSNBC host and Enemy of the American People Chris Hayes proved how negative the media are:

Still, the task of getting the president's attention appears to have finally been accomplished, because this morning, in addition to the terrific news about the S&P, Trump also pointed out that Puerto Rico's governor thinks he's just the best. Too bad we can't really afford to help too much, because come on, helping Puerto Rico is expensive:  

Remember how Trump told the people of Texas and Florida not to get their hopes up too much about federal aid?

Yeah, neither do we.

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[ Wapo / NPR / WaPo / Daily Beast / CNN / WaPo / Shareblue / Bloomberg ]