White House defends Trump’s Puerto Rico tweets as battling ‘false accusations’

The White House on Thursday defended President Trump’s comments casting doubt on the hurricane death toll in Puerto Rico, blaming the media and San Juan’s mayor for trying to “exploit the devastation.”

“As the President said, every death from Hurricane Maria is a horror,” White House spokesman Hogan Gidley said Thursday in a statement to CNN. “President Trump was responding to the liberal media and the San Juan Mayor who sadly have tried to exploit the devastation by pushing out a constant stream of misinformation and false accusations.”

Carmen Yulín Cruz, the mayor of San Juan, Puerto Rico, has repeatedly gone after the president, criticizing his administration for its response to the hurricane’s destruction in Puerto Rico. 

The president in turn has said that the human cost of Hurricane Maria was a result of Puerto Rico’s infrastructure and the incompetence of local officials like Cruz, calling his administration’s response there an “unsung success.”

{mosads}Gidley defended the administration’s performance in his statement Thursday, saying, “Before, during and after the two massive hurricanes, the President directed the entire Administration to provide an unprecedented support to Puerto Rico.”

The White House says Trump was “responding to the liberal media and San Juan Mayor who sadly, have tried to exploit the devastation by pushing out a constant stream of misinformation and false accusations” when said, with no evidence, that 3,000 people didn’t die in Puerto Rico. pic.twitter.com/sR882Zyjil

— Kaitlan Collins (@kaitlancollins) September 13, 2018

The president tweeted on Thursday, without evidence, that the estimate that 3,000 people died in Puerto Rico as a result of Hurricane Maria was inflated by Democrats. 

3000 people did not die in the two hurricanes that hit Puerto Rico. When I left the Island, AFTER the storm had hit, they had anywhere from 6 to 18 deaths. As time went by it did not go up by much. Then, a long time later, they started to report really large numbers, like 3000…

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) September 13, 2018

…..This was done by the Democrats in order to make me look as bad as possible when I was successfully raising Billions of Dollars to help rebuild Puerto Rico. If a person died for any reason, like old age, just add them onto the list. Bad politics. I love Puerto Rico!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) September 13, 2018

The 3,000 death toll is an estimate from George Washington University’s study based on a comparison of estimates of typical non-disaster death rates in Puerto Rico over six months to the actual mortality rate over the six months after Maria.

Researchers stood by their estimate and methods on Thursday.

“We are confident that the number — 2,975 — is the most accurate and unbiased estimate of excess mortality to date,” GWU’s Milken Institute School of Public Health said in a statement.

Puerto Rico updated its official death toll following the release of the extensive study last month.

Updated: 10:20 p.m.