Trump defends Puerto Rico effort, but his tweets draw new criticism

President Donald Trump on Sunday defended US efforts to bring relief to storm-battered Puerto Rico, even as one island official said Trump was trying to gloss over “things that are not going well.”....
A day after Trump launched a Twitter attack against San Juan Mayor Carmen Yulin Cruz following her desperate pleas for more help, he tweeted that “we have done a great job with the almost impossible situation in Puerto Rico.”

Trump said US military teams and the Federal Emergency Management Agency were doing “amazing work” and credited the island’s governor and others with a “fantastic job.”

But two weeks after devastating Hurricane Maria left much of the island without electricity, fresh water or sufficient food, many Puerto Ricans seemed to have a far gloomier outlook.

Hilda Lopez, in her 80s, broke into tears when approached as she left Mass at San Juan’s Cathedral.

“It pains me that the president of the United States has expressed himself the way he has in recent days. I don’t know if it’s because he doesn’t appreciate the pain” that Puerto Ricans are suffering.

‘Looking for an excuse’
Trump, in one tweet Sunday, said that those who continued to criticize the relief effort were either “Fake News or politically motivated ingrates.”

Mayor Cruz, in an interview with CNN, shrugged off the criticism. She told CNN that millions were still in dire circumstances, and that Trump seemed to be “looking for an excuse for things that are not going well.”

Trump’s criticism has drawn sharp retorts even from within his Republican Party.

“When people are in the middle of a disaster, you don’t start trying to criticize them,” Ohio Governor John Kasich, a presidential hopeful in 2016, said on CNN. “You got to be bigger than the nonsense.”

And Senator Bernie Sanders, an independent who ran for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2016, told CNN: “Speaking from his fancy golf club, playing golf with his billionaire friends, attacking the mayor of San Juan, who is struggling to bring electricity to the island, food to the island, water to the island, gas to the island, that is just — it is unspeakable.

“And I don’t know what world Trump is living in.”

Trump spent Sunday morning at his golf resort in Bedminster, New Jersey, before traveling to another golf course in nearby Jersey City to present the trophy to the winner of the Presidents Cup tournament. He dedicated the tournament trophy to all recent US hurricane victims.