https://www.washingtonpost.com/news...er-in-the-white-house/?utm_term=.b57e82deb874
No power, no water, destroyed housing, washed-out bridges, ruined agriculture. Frankly, President Trump is out of patience with this sort of whining from Puerto Rico.
And while relief to the island, which Trump discovered is surrounded by water ON ALL SIDES, has been slow in arriving, Trump has been lightning-fast on the blame-shifting. That started arriving by planeload, boatload and tweetload before the storm winds had even died down. And anyway, Puerto Rico is in an ocean, a big one, and they aren’t real Americans, any more than they are on that other island, Hawaii, located in an even bigger ocean. The island that former president Barack Obama tried to claim as his birthplace in his phony bid for citizenship.
Trump says that the mess in Puerto Rico is of the Puerto Ricans’ own making. They let things go, and let systems run down, decay and break. They took the lazy way, and when the crisis came, they were unprepared, so they clearly deserve whatever level of human immiseration they now suffer. What’s left of the federal government isn’t going to save them. Trump is sending an important message here.
The message is that the United States, by tolerating the unprecedented change in political climate of the Trump presidency, is letting things go, letting systems run down, decay and break. We are taking the lazy way, and when our crisis comes, there won’t be any federal government left to save us.
The Trump White House is also an island, surrounded by an ocean of excusers and collaborators. A very big ocean.
So there sits Trump, exhaling a Category 5 gale of dysfunction and indifference to human suffering in Puerto Rico, blowing away the windows, roofs and walls of our norms of governing and simple decency. The so-called adults on the premises are doing us no favors in trying to contain the damage. It isn’t being contained. It is quickly infiltrating everything it touches, like septic water, and the rot will ensure our institutions are already soggy and collapsing when we need them in the next storm.