San Juan mayor lambastes Trump's 'insulting' visit to Puerto Rico

The mayor of San Juan, Puerto Rico, strongly denounced Donald Trump Tuesday night after the president visited the island, calling him the “miscommunicator in chief” and “insulting.”

“He was insulting to the people of Puerto Rico,” Mayor Carmen Yulín Cruz said Tuesday night on MSNBC hours after meeting Trump face-to-face at a briefing with Puerto Rican leaders and the president. Beyond the briefing, Trump also toured damaged areas and helped distribute supplies, flicking paper towels into a crowd with the motion of a jump shot in basketball. All of it, Cruz said, was disingenuous.


“This was a PR, 17-minute meeting. There was no exchange with anybody, with none of the mayors,” the mayor said. “And in fact, this terrible and abominable view of him throwing paper towels and throwing provisions at people, it really — it does not embody the spirit of the American nation, you know?”

Particularly egregious, according to the mayor, was Trump’s remark during the briefing with Puerto Rican officials that they should “be very proud” because the death toll on the island has not spiked as it did in New Orleans following Hurricane Katrina, which the president said was “a real catastrophe.”

“He kind of minimized our suffering here by saying that Katrina was a real disaster, sort of implying that this was not a real disaster because not many people have died here,” Cruz said. “Well you know what? They’re dying. They don’t have the medical resources.”

The mayor and Trump butted heads ahead of the president’s Tuesday visit, a feud that began last week when Cruz appeared on CNN, begging for more help from the federal government and slamming the glowing appraisal of the recovery effort that acting Homeland Security Secretary Elaine Duke had given earlier in the week. Trump then lashed out at the mayor, writing online that she had been instructed by Democrats to attack the president and that she and other Puerto Rican leaders “want everything to be done for them.”

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On his way out of the White House on Tuesday morning, Trump said Cruz had “come back a long way” toward approving the federal government response, which he continued to describe as excellent. Wednesday morning, Trump wrote that he had spent a “a great day in Puerto Rico yesterday,” adding that “while some of the news coverage is Fake, most showed great warmth and friendship.”

Cruz, in her Tuesday MSNBC interview, offered a harsher assessment of the president’s visit.

“I said this morning that he really has a communication issue. You know, he’s gotten sort of like miscommunicator in chief,” she said. “And really, you don’t go to another place when people are in peril and are suffering and you just kind of hover around in a helicopter without having some kind words to say. It’s just common courtesy. But his staff, on the other hand, seemed to want to approach this a different way.”

