(CNN) Two days after Hurricane Maria made landfall on Puerto Rico, President Donald Trump was busy kicking up a storm of his own.

Speaking in Alabama on Friday night, September 22, 2017, Trump took aim at the small group of NFL players who were kneeling, during the national anthem, as a protest against racial injustice. Team owners, he said, should be meeting their demonstrations with calls to "get that son of a bitch off the field right now," adding theatrically: "He's fired!"

As the President blustered and baited, Puerto Rico suffered. According to the official count, 64 people died during and after the ravenous storm. That estimate was always assumed to be on the low end, but a new, independent study published this week in The New England Journal of Medicine has brought to bear something closer to the true depths of the tragedy. In their report, researchers from Harvard and other institutions placed the toll much higher, at more than 4,600 lives.

One-third of the fatalities, the study found, "were reported by household members as being caused by delayed or prevented access to medical care."

The magnitude of loss on the island -- and the continued suffering of both the people still there and those forced to flee -- will be a stain on the Trump administration that outlasts its time in Washington, a searing reminder of what's at risk when a society and its leaders reveal themselves to be unequipped, in every sense, to contend with a real disaster.