Maribel Hastings
San Juan, Puerto Rico – Wow. Another day for Donald Trump to exude lies and stupidities. Will it ever end?
The former is a play on the cretinous Tweet from Trump earlier this week when asking if atmospheric phenomena will ever stop. He said: “Wow! Yet another big storm heading to Puerto Rico. Will it ever end?”
It’s clear that a president who rejects science and climate change cannot understand that hurricanes have been and will always be in existence, and that precisely thanks to the global warming that he so often makes fun of, they will be increasingly more intense and frequent.
It would be like complaining about hurricanes in Florida, earthquakes and fires in California, heavy snow in the northeast of the United States, and tornadoes in the states that make up Tornado Alley.
But the most sinister is that while now Hurricane Dorian was heading toward Puerto Rico, which has still not recovered from the ravages of Hurricane María two years ago, Trump decides to divert $271 million in funds from the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), including $155 million from FEMA for disaster preparedness, to send it to the southern border, specifically to increase the size of his deplorable migrant detention centers, and to establish temporary asylum courts for migrants who have been forced to wait in Mexico, with the cruel objective of making them grow tired and return to their countries of origin.
Surprising? Absolutely not. Shameful? Totally.
In the case of Puerto Rico, he called us “ungrateful,” and in a prior Tweet told countless lies like that Puerto Rico received $92 billion after María, although in reality it was $42 billion; and from this amount only around $13 billion have actually arrived on the Island by May. Neither does that figure break records, as Trump said, because many reports have concluded that the record for the highest cost goes to Hurricane Katrina in 2005.
Trump also took to Twitter to call us “corrupt,” as if the people were guilty of acts committed by a few bad apples. This society is resilient. It survived two back-to-back hurricanes in 2017 and the resulting economic crisis, from which it has not yet emerged; even still, Puerto Ricans took to the streets this year to demand the resignation of a governor and condemn the corruption that Trump now assigns to us all. But if we are talking about corruption, as the saying goes, “that’s like the pot calling the kettle black.”
Apart from redirecting emergency disaster preparedness funds on the eve of hurricane season (pay attention, Florida), Trump continued on with his crusade of cruelty against migrants, minorities, and more vulnerable sectors of society. Earlier this week, he eliminated a form of protection for migrants who are receiving life-saving medical treatment, or have family members doing so.
Another day, another attack from Trump on decency and values. Will it ever end?
——-
To read the Spanish-language version of this column, please click here
