President Donald Trump Trump has finally arrived to Puerto Rico, with the purpose of seeing first hand, the devastation that has taken place in the island. The President seemed in good spirits and hopeful that his intervention can make a difference in the wake of Hurricane Maria.
However, like everything revolving Donald Trump, controversy always follows, as he told local leaders during a briefing at the Muniz Air National Guard Base, that they were throwing the federal government’s budget “a little out of whack” with their need for disaster relief funding.
“I hate to tell you, Puerto Rico, but you’ve thrown our budget a little out of whack because we’ve spent a lot of money,” Trump said jokingly during the briefing. “And that’s fine, we’ve saved a lot of lives,” continued the President with a smile on his face.
Trump: "I hate to tell you, Puerto Rico, but you've thrown our budget a little out of whack" pic.twitter.com/5z1gfqgy4F
— Washington Examiner (@dcexaminer) October 3, 2017
Why would Donald Trump say something like that? Well, in this case, mostly because it’s true, at this very moment, the President’s administration is preparing to ask Congress for an additional $10 billion, that will make a world of difference in facilitating relief efforts in Puerto Rico.
Sure, his past actions leave us suspicious of his tone, specially because it wasn’t too long ago, that the President was picking up a Twitter fight with the Mayor of San Juan, but only last month, his administration got Congress to approve a $15 billion relief package to help Texas and Florida, both of which were also struck by their own destructive hurricanes, hurting hundreds of thousand Latino brothers on the way.
The President did minimize the problems Puerto Rico is facing, but again, it seemed to come more from a place of hope than of malice, besides Donald Trump warned us in the past that his tone might not always be as presidential as we would expect it to be. He compared Hurricane Maria to Katrina, an event he referred to as a “real catastrophe”, given the 1,836 casualties the states of Louisiana and Mississippi had to endure, again he made this point with the intention of making the people of Puerto Rico feel like they are in good hands and that things will return to normal quick.
Even if the President’s comments did carry his distinctive and polarizing tone, this time around, they didn’t feel violent, we can expect government officials to put their differences aside, if only for a moment, to do what needs to be done for the people of Puerto Rico, Texas and Florida.