The parallels between the crises—two meteorological, one medical—are eerily exact
’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.
. 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.as she sought supplemental relief.
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.
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.
As with the COVID-19 crisis, Trump lavished early praise on the American response to the Hurricane Maria emergency , 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.
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