President Tiny Twitter Fingers lashed out at the mayor of San Juan, Puerto Rico, on Saturday morning using thinly veiled racist language to disparage Puerto Ricans who are in desperate need of help after Hurricane Maria.
Trump, tweeting from a golf course in New Jersey (because where else would the president be when citizens of the U.S. are facing a humanitarian crisis?), went on a rant early Saturday morning after Mayor Carmen Yulín Cruz of San Juan desperately begged for help on Friday.
“I am going to do what I never thought I would do,” said Cruz. “I am begging, begging, anyone who can hear us to save us from dying.”
Cruz, a member of the island’s Popular Democratic Party, said Friday that federal aid was coming in too slowly, and criticized Homeland Security Secretary Elaine Duke for referring to the U.S. response to the struggling Puerto Rico as a “good news story.”
She also accused the Trump administration of “killing us with inefficiency.”
I guess the president didn’t like her tone.
“They want everything to be done for them when it should be a community effort,” the president tweeted around 7:30 a.m. Saturday.
He also said that there were “10,000 Federal workers now on Island doing a fantastic job.”
“Fantastic” would not be the word anyone would use in terms of the federal response in Puerto Rico; and yet when news outlets reported these facts, the president called them “fake” (of course).
To even assume that American citizens in the throes of a natural disaster “want everything done for them” just plays into the racist trope of people of color being lazy and unwilling to help themselves, which, it goes without saying, is b.s.
Of course Trump got stomped on Twitter this a.m.:
Playwright Lin-Manuel Miranda, who was born in New York City but who is of Puerto Rican descent, told the president he was going straight to hell—no passing go:
He also called the president a “congenital liar” and defended Cruz:
Others openly wondered how a U.S. military that is worth hundreds of billions of dollars can’t get its act together for the people of Puerto Rico.
Good question.