On Monday evening, President Trump launched into a lengthy social media invective against the U.S. territory of Puerto Rico, lambasting its politicians for their handling of federal disaster relief aid in the aftermath of hurricanes Maria and Irma. Elected officials there "only take from [the] USA," he complained, referring to an island that has been part of the country he governs for well over a century. "The place is a mess—nothing works."

The immediate source of his grumpiness was the Senate's rejection of a pair of larger disaster relief packages on Monday. A Democratic one, which the House approved in January, would have allocated more money to Puerto Rico and a handful of states grappling with the fallout from hurricanes, wildfires, and other catastrophes; it failed by a 46-48 vote. Lawmakers also voted down a Republican-backed bill, which included relief for Iowa and other Midwestern states ravaged by tornadoes and flooding but included only a relative pittance for Puerto Rico, by a final count of 44-49. (The House bill excludes flood-related money because it passed before the floods took place; as part of yesterday's proceedings, Senate Republicans rejected a Democratic amendment that would have corrected for this discrepancy.)

A particularly frustrating bugaboo for Trump is the specific amount of relief—$91 billion—he claims to have already provided to Puerto Rico, which he sees as evidence that its 3.2 million American citizens do not deserve additional support from the government to which they pay taxes. This number is likely the product of some extremely fuzzy addition: $41 billion that has already been allocated to Puerto Rico, and a projected $50 billion in recovery costs over the next few decades, which has assuredly not already been allocated to Puerto Rico. In fact, only about a quarter of that $41 billion has actually been delivered or approved, according to the Washington Post's analysis. The balance is stuck somewhere in a bureaucratic hell of the Trump administration's own creation.

The failure of the bills was not a surprise, given that Democrats promised last week to reject any measure that excluded Puerto Rico, even as anonymous White House advisors told reporters that the president "doesn’t want another single dollar going to the island." Even so, he handled the Senate's withholding of money from crimson states on his beloved 2016 Electoral College map, coupled with a renewed focus on the welfare of a place in which Spanish-speaking people live, about as tactfully as you'd expect. Democrats are taking money from "our" farmers and states, he declared, choosing a possessive that doubles as the world's most piercing dog whistle. To him, "farmers" living in "states" are Americans who are worthy of help; Puerto Ricans, by contrast, are an expensive inconvenience.

While attempting to explain the president's comments in a Tuesday appearance on MSNBC, White House spokesperson Hogan Gidley referred multiple times to Puerto Rico as "that country." An intern hustled to reset the West Wing's "This Workplace Has Gone __ Days Without a Racist Incident" counter shortly thereafter.

Gidley would later characterize this phrase as a "slip of the tongue," which Freud enthusiasts would argue constitutes more of an admission than a defense.