Donald Trump fist-pumped his way to the 9/11 memorial service on Tuesday, then followed up with an interview in which he bragged about the “incredible, unsung success” of the hurricane assistance to Puerto Rico. He returned to his disaster montage on Wednesday morning, bragging that he got “A Pluses” for hurricane relief in Florida and Texas and complaining about the “unappreciated great job” for the 3,000 deaths on Puerto Rico, which he called “an inaccessible island.”
While Trump claimed victory in Puerto Rico, he did insist that he had some terrible obstacles to overcome, including “very poor electricity and a totally incompetent Mayor of San Juan.” That mayor—whose “incompetence” consisted of criticizing Trump’s one-day paper towel-throwing visit to the island—had a brief response.
Actually Trump knows exactly what he considers a disaster. It’s what most people call “peace.” Trump likes noise, confusion, and emotion. The Washington Post reports that Trump constantly struggles to display any sense of “empathy” or to play the role of “consoler in chief.” But the truth is that Trump doesn’t struggle. Because he doesn’t try. Because he isn’t interested.
Trump, inside and outside of the White House, is a Michael Bay movie: He’s more interested in the explosions than the characters. He’s all Shock Doctrine, every day.
For Trump, the disasters are the highlights. That’s where all the sound and fury and excitement is. It’s where buildings tumble, and waves crash, and some crazy-but-brave pilot sacrifices himself by flying up the butt of an alien spacecraft. Not Trump, of course. He’s only there for the popcorn. But still, these are the good parts. Which is why, with a massive hurricane bearing down on the East Coast, Trump is talking like he can’t decide whether to watch it on the big screen, or the Really Big Screen.
Trump: Tremendously big and tremendously wet — tremendous amounts of water.
He’s not talking about a bed in Moscow. He’s talking about cities in North and South Carolina that are facing the onslaught of a Category 4 storm and the prospect of days of driving rain.
Trump: There has never been a season like the last 12 or 13 months. I’ve never seen anything like it.
If he sounds excited, it’s because he is. Donald Trump doesn’t want credit for the recovery. He wants points for the storms. While he had no details to provide about that “unsung success” in Puerto Rico, he was more than happy to ramble on about the “historic severity” of the storms, and the “record water drop.”
As the BBC reports, Puerto Rico Governor Ricardo Rossello followed Trump’s unsung success statement with one of his own on Tuesday night. Rossello called Maria “The worst natural disaster in our modern history” and said of his island “Our basic infrastructure was devastated, thousands of our people lost their lives and many others still struggle."
The response to Maria was wholly inadequate on every front. People were left without food, without water, and without electricity for months. Obvious steps, from basic supplies to positioning hospital ships, were not taken. Not only were only a relative handful of crews brought in to deal with the disaster in real time, but the massive contract to restore power across the entire island was handed to a two-person company based in the home town of Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke. Similarly, contracts for some other supplies were awarded to companies that only existed as a bid on a form.
How can that be Donald Trump’s definition of success? Easy: No one is holding him to blame for any of it. There’s no big congressional investigation. No real public pressure. Trump appointed Brock Long head of FEMA six months before Maria hit. He’s still there as Florence approaches the Carolinas, and no one has even made a sound about holding Long, or Trump, or anyone else responsible for the deaths of 3,000 Americans, the displacement of tens of thousands more, and the long-term suffering of millions.
But hey, no one pays attention to the extras in this kind of film. Time for the next big explosion.