Puerto Rico Gov. Ricardo Rosselló is pushing back hard against President Trump’s assertion that nearly 3,000 Puerto Ricans did not die as a result of Hurricane Maria, and that Democrats are simply making up the numbers.
“Neither the people of Puerto Rico nor the victims deserve their pain to be questioned,” Rosselló told CBS News. “If you listen to all of our communications, mine in particular, every time we spoke about the death toll numbers in the early going after the storm, we always knew that that number was going to be much higher. We just needed to have a real, better mechanism for identifying.”
Rosselló is speaking out after Trump denied a report that concluded 2,975 people died as a result of the massive hurricane last summer..
In a pair of tweets this morning, Trump wrote:
In fact, the number of deaths comes from an independent analysis by researchers at George Washington University’s Milken Institute School of Public Health, which was commissioned and accepted by the governor. It found around 2,975 more deaths than normal occurred in Puerto Rico from September 2017, when hurricanes Irma and Maria hit, to February 2018.
“We went through a rigorous scientific process, we externalized the investigation so that it was an independent investigation,” Rosselló said. “We are confident in that estimate. This was the worst natural disaster in our modern history. Our basic infrastructure was devastated, thousands of our people lost their lives and many others still struggle.”
House Speaker Paul Ryan told reporters late this morning that he has “no reason to dispute the numbers” from the report.
He also claimed that a death toll in the thousands does not reflect poorly on Trump, saying, “casualties don’t make a person look bad.”
San Juan Mayor Carmen Yulín Cruz, a Democrat who tangled with Trump while Hurricane Maria made international news, fired back at him on Twitter today:
In the Oval Office on Tuesday, Trump praised his administration’s response saying, “I think Puerto Rico was an incredible, unsung success.”
But hours later photographs emerged showing millions of bottles of drinking water, meant for Maria survivors, still sitting under blue tarps on a runway there.
Gov. Rosselló is now calling on Congress to make Puerto Rico America’s 51st state. That debate is something many believe should be happening now.