It’s often been said that the current pandemic is Donald Trump’s first real calamity, the first true test of his capacity as a leader. And yet I’ve been experiencing déjà vu. Ever since the president first began bungling his way through the coronavirus crisis, I’ve been thinking we’ve seen this movie before. And we have. His behavior during Hurricanes Irma and Maria was a perfect template for how he’d manage the government’s crisis response: as a Mini-Me commander in chief, a president self-absorbed and disingenuous, lashing out at perceived political and media enemies, while seemingly determined to do the least.

The parallels between the crises—two meteorological, one medical—are eerily exact. When Maria, the Category 5 hurricane, pummeled Puerto Rico in September 2017, the island was still recovering from Hurricane Irma, which had swept in two weeks before. Trump at first seemed to treat the situation as more of a nuisance than a humanitarian emergency. And as with his administration’s subsequent coronavirus efforts, the U.S. was roundly chastised for its pokey response in providing federal assistance.

The president belittled San Juan’s mayor, Carmen Yulín Cruz, as she sought supplemental relief. He criticized civic leaders and residents for lacking unity in addressing the disaster, which decimated hundreds of structures and cut off millions of people from sources of power and water. “Such poor leadership ability by the Mayor of San Juan,” Trump tweeted, “and others in Puerto Rico, who are not able to get their workers to help. They want everything to be done for them when it should be a community effort.” This was not merely Trump’s standard-issue blame-the-victim protocol. It was also racist code. Some of the commonwealth’s citizens, he was implying, were, in a word, shiftless, and had helped bring their predicament on themselves. His rhetoric gave hints of how he’d respond over two years later, calling COVID-19 “the Chinese virus.”

In the aftermath of Hurricanes Irma and Maria, Trump, as he has during the current crisis, seemed most animated by the monetary challenges. In one particularly nasty tweet, he accused Puerto Rico’s “inept politicians” of “trying to use the massive and ridiculously high amounts of hurricane/disaster funding to pay off other obligations. The U.S. will NOT bail out long outstanding & unpaid obligations with hurricane relief money!” According to the Washington Post, Trump told top aides that he hoped disaster money could be redirected from San Juan to states like Florida and Texas, which had recently been hit by Hurricanes Irma and Harvey, reportedly insisting that he didn’t want “a single dollar going to Puerto Rico.”

When Trump paid a visit to Puerto Rico, which was still reeling from the damage, he seemed less like a head of state than a beneficent monarch—or a baseball mascot—tossing rolls of paper towels into a crowd of survivors. He told the island’s leaders that they hadn’t had to face a “real catastrophe like Katrina.” The president also made a stop in hurricane-ravaged Houston, going full Barbara Bush as he reportedly quipped, “Have a good time, everybody.” (The former first lady made a similarly tone-deaf comment in 2005. Upon meeting with people displaced by Hurricane Katrina at Houston’s Astrodome, she remarked: “What I’m hearing, which is sort of scary, is they all want to stay in Texas…So many of the people in the arena here, you know, were underprivileged anyway, so this is working very well for them.”)

As with the COVID-19 crisis, Trump lavished early praise on the American response to the Hurricane Maria emergency (“fantastic job”), even though first-person accounts chronicled a lag in the U.S. efforts. As with COVID-19, the president’s tendency to downplay the number of individuals affected by the catastrophe appeared to be his way of soft-pedaling a massive tragedy, substituting magical thinking for cold, hard fact. Noted Vanity Fair’s Bess Levin at the time, “The death count in Puerto Rico—which Trump has repeatedly bragged about being in the low double-digits—is thought to be roughly 10 times the official count.” (The official count turned out to be in the thousands.) Sound familiar?

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