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Friday, July 11, 2025

Poole: Trump shows no sympathy to hurricane victims

Trump in Carolinas

Trump visits the Carolinas to assess the damage done by Hurricane Florence.

Hurricane Florence hit the Carolinas as a Category 1 storm on Sept. 14, devastating the areas it hit. Within just a couple of hours, 600,000 people were left without electricity, according to Elite Daily.

According to President Donald Trump, Hurricane Florence is “one of the wettest we’ve ever seen from the standpoint of water.” Yes, you read that correctly.

On Sept. 19, Trump boarded Air Force One to visit the Carolinas about a week after Florence hit. However, the video he posted on Twitter the night before that is what caught the internet’s attention.

The video feels more like an awards speech than it does a post-natural disaster public service announcement. Throughout history, United States presidents have delivered historic addresses, memorable quotes and have left us all inspired - Trump is calling hurricanes “wet”.

While it’s all fun and games to joke about Trump’s comments, it’s important to realize the severity of what happened.

NC Damage

Flooding from Hurricane Florence is seen in Lumberton, North Carolina.

44 people have died so far from the storm as of Sept. 22, according to CNN. Roughly 300,000 people are still without power, according to CBS News.

It's still to be determined how Trump and his team will handle Hurricane Florence's relief efforts - if it's anything like their efforts after Hurricane Maria in 2017, then nothing adequately will get done.

Hurricane Maria hit Puerto Rico in September of 2017 leaving people without homes, electricity and belongings. Nearly 3,000 people lost their lives because of the hurricane, according to research done by George Washington University (GWU). Despite the facts, Trump has claimed his administration’s efforts were a success and then sent out a Tweet on Sept. 13 disputing the death toll.

Researchers didn’t attribute any certain person’s death to Hurricane Maria and given the methodology, there wasn’t any kind of opportunity to misclassify someone who died of old age, as Trump suggested.

In reality, the study looked at the number of deaths from September 2017 to February 2018 and compared that total with what was expected based on historical patterns. They factored in a decent amount of variables, including the departure of hundreds of thousands of residents.

If the researchers at GWU had done what Trump claimed they did, the six-month death toll from the hurricane would have been 16,608 according to the Washington Post.

Trump’s comments on the Puerto Rico casualties shocked his advisers and officials at the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), who had been working to prepare the Carolinas for Hurricane Florence.

According to Trump, the numbers were done by Democrats to make him look bad. Not only is that a huge slap in the face to the residents of Puerto Rico, but also its government officials.

Trump has come under a lot of criticism for his handling of the disaster, primarily from Carmen Yulín Cruz, the mayor of Puerto Rico's capital city San Juan.

“The administration killed the Puerto Ricans with neglect. The Trump administration led us to believe they were helping when they weren't up to par, and they didn't allow other countries to help us,” Cruz told CNN on Aug. 29. “Shame on President Trump. Shame on President Trump for not even once, not even yesterday, just saying, ‘Look, I grieve with the people of Puerto Rico'".

Last year when Trump and his administration visited Puerto Rico after Maria hit, they met with local leaders and federal responders for a briefing on the situation on the island. Trump made comments about how Puerto Rico has thrown “our budget out of whack” and then went on to compare Maria to Hurricane Katrina.

Puerto Rico Damage

Puerto Rico after Maria is left with no power, no cell signal and lots of destruction.  

“...every death is a horror, but if you look at a real catastrophe like Katrina and you look at the tremendous hundreds and hundreds of people that died and what happened here with a storm that was just totally overbearing. No one has ever seen anything like that. What is your death count?" he asked.

Governor Ricardo Rosselló responded, informing Trump that at that point in time, the death toll was at sixteen. Trump responded by saying the government should be “very proud.”

Before Trump and his administration started to provide aid to the victims of Hurricane Maria, the death toll was at 64. Long after relief was implemented, the death toll rose to 2,975, signifying a failure in the relief efforts.

Trump has touted the relief efforts as “fantastic” despite the fact that people went weeks and months without power and more people died in the aftermath of the hurricane than the actual initial damage.

The following weeks of the disaster, Trump struck out at media that highlighted the conditions that much of the island continued to face weeks and months after the hurricane hit and the slow pace of the recovery efforts.

His comments run counter to the many comments residents and experts have made to assess the administration’s self-declared success.

On Sept. 11, Cruz said in a statement to CNN, “In a humanitarian crisis, you should not be grading yourself. You should not be just having a parade of self-accolades. You should never be content with everything we did. I'm not content with everything I did, I should have done more. We should all have done more.”

Cruz went on to say that if Trump didn’t do anything in Puerto Rico, then “God bless the people of South Carolina and the people of North Carolina”.

While Trump has praised his administration’s work, other people in his administration have learned their lessons.

The Government Accountability Office released a report revealing FEMA had been so overwhelmed with storms by the time Hurricane Maria hit that more than half the workers sent out to disasters weren’t qualified for the jobs in the field.

Federal Emergency Management Agency Administrator Brock Long said FEMA has since changed its priorities and procedures, according to CNN.

In the wake of Hurricane Florence I can’t help but feel scared for the victims of the disaster. If the current administration leading this country couldn’t adequately help those in Puerto Rico, there’s no evidence to believe those affected by Florence will be helped.

Since the death toll is currently sitting at 44, it’s possible it will go up. A year from now, we might be looking at another tweet where Trump discredits those who lost their lives.

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