President Donald Trump brought a jarring tone to Puerto Rico as he toured the hurricane devastation Tuesday, appearing to blame the U.S. territory for having “thrown our budget a little out of whack” and complimenting officials for sustaining only 16 deaths, compared with the much higher human toll of Hurricane Katrina.

“I hate to tell you, Puerto Rico, but you’ve thrown our budget a little out of whack because we’ve spent a lot of money on Puerto Rico,” Trump said as he met with local officials from the island, which declared a form of bankruptcy in May. “And that’s fine.”


The president also appeared to boast that the death toll in Puerto Rico pales in comparison to the more than 1,800 fatalities that followed Katrina in 2005.

“We saved a lot of lives,” said Trump, who added that “every death is a horror” and broached what he called “a real catastrophe” in Katrina.

“Sixteen people versus in the thousands,” the president said, overstating Katrina’s death toll.

“You can be very proud of all of your people, all of our people working together,” he told Gov. Ricardo Rosselló. “Sixteen versus literally thousands of people. You can be very proud. Everybody around this table and everybody watching can really be very proud of what’s taken place in Puerto Rico.”

A Rosselló spokesman said Tuesday night that the death toll had more than doubled, to 34, news agencies reported.

Trump landed in Puerto Rico on Tuesday after spending much of the past week boasting about a wildly successful response effort that hasn’t matched the reality of the hurricane-ravaged island — and after picking a fight over the weekend with San Juan's mayor and other "political motivated ingrates" who have questioned the robustness of the federal response.

The visit came as he’s attempting to be soother-in-chief for the nation after a shooting in Las Vegas left at least 59 dead on Sunday night — the first time he’s had to navigate two disasters of national scope that are politically perilous for any president, but especially one prone to off-the-cuff riffs.

The Puerto Rico stop marks only the start of emotionally charged travels for Trump this week. On Wednesday, he is scheduled to travel to Las Vegas to meet with the families of victims of Sunday’s massacre.

Trump struck a somber and unifying tone Monday when discussing the attack in Las Vegas. But on Tuesday, he traded the scripted and controlled setting of the Diplomatic Room for a storm-ravaged island where more than half of the residents remain without access to drinking water and only 5 percent of the island has electricity.

Throughout the day, he boasted about his administration's response and appeared to repeatedly blame Puerto Rico for its poor infrastructure and financial situation before Hurricane Maria ripped through and left a humanitarian crisis in its wake.

Early on Tuesday, Trump extended praise to his officials and to Rosselló, Puerto Rico’s Democratic governor. And he asked the island territory's Republican non-voting congresswoman, Jenniffer González-Colón, to repeat past accolades of the administration’s response for the television cameras.

“He’s not even from my party, and he started right at the beginning appreciating what we did,” Trump said of Rosselló. “Right from the beginning this governor did not play politics. He didn't play it at all. He was saying it like it was, and he was giving us the highest grades. And on behalf of our country, I wanna thank you.”

Trump, however, sought to have the plaudits reciprocated, noting that he watched González-Colón say “such nice things about all of the people that have worked so hard” the other day and asking her to repeat her compliments.

“Jenniffer, do you think you can say a little bit [of] what you said about us today?” Trump asked. “And it’s not about me. It’s about these incredible people, from the military to FEMA to first responders. I mean, I’ve never seen people working so hard in my life. Perhaps you could say, congresswoman?”

Cameras captured the president engaging in a conversation with a hurricane victim, asking multiple questions and commending public officials in closing, but also telling another group of victims impacted by the storm to “have a good time.”

The pool of reporters accompanying the president described a pair of basketball-related exchanges. Trump asked a teenager whether he played basketball and was going to the NBA. After handing out bags of rice at a church, Trump began tossing paper towels into the crowd — mimicking the motions of a jump shot.

In later remarks Tuesday — as the president handed out flashlights — Trump insisted Puerto Ricans don’t need flashlights, though much of the territory is still without power, as he acknowledged to reporters just minutes prior.

“The power grid, honestly, was devastated before the hurricanes even hit. And then the hurricanes hit and they wiped them out,” Trump said. “A lot of generators have been already brought to the island. Most of the hospitals are open — or at least partially open. But most of them now are open. And, again, the job that’s been done here is really nothing short of a miracle. It’s been incredible.”

Trump has courted controversy by blasting on Twitter the “poor leadership ability” of Puerto Rican officials, who he said “want everything to be done for them.” Trump had also said the island’s leaders “are not able to get their workers to help,” and he accused Carmen Yulín Cruz, the Democratic mayor of San Juan — who repeatedly slammed the Trump administration’s response to Hurricane Maria — of trying to score partisan political points by criticizing him.

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“We have done a great job with the almost impossible situation in Puerto Rico. Outside of the Fake News or politically motivated ingrates,” Trump tweeted on Sunday.

All the while, he’s kept up an upbeat tone about the response. He told reporters in the Oval Office on Monday that it’s “amazing what’s been done in a very short period of time.” He added: “There’s never been a piece of land that we’ve known that was so devastated.”

Other officials have echoed his attitude. “The federal government is doing everything within our powers and capabilities to first focus on the life-sustaining and life-saving measures as well as on the rebuilding process,” press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders told reporters on Monday.

But Trump's comments on Tuesday at times distracted from his administration's response efforts, with Cruz, the San Juan mayor, freshly criticizing the president for his comments about Puerto Rico's impact on the U.S. budget.

“It goes to prove the lack of sensibility,” she told CNN in an interview.

Colin Wilhelm contributed to this report.

