As a New Hurricane Roars In, Trump Quarrels Over the Last One 当新的一轮台风咆哮到来（台风“弗洛伦斯“），特朗普还在就上一次台风事件（台风“玛丽亚”）争论不休。
President Trump last year in Puerto Rico 波多黎各（位于西印度群岛东部的岛屿） after Hurricane Maria. This week, he called the federal response to that storm an “incredible, unsung success” 难以置信的、被埋没了的成功 and rejected the official estimate that almost 3,000 people had died.
WASHINGTON — The presidential playbook 剧本 during times of disaster is pretty well established by now: Consult with emergency officials (and be seen doing so). Express concern for those affected (on camera). Assure the public that the government is ready for whatever comes (whether it is or not).
But once again, President Trump has rewritten the playbook as Hurricane Florence blows through the Carolinas. While delivering forceful messages of warning and reassurance, Mr. Trump has also been busy awarding himself good grades for past hurricanes 在以往台风应对中取得的 好成绩 and even accusing opponents of inventing a death toll 虚构死者调查报告 “to make me look as bad as possible.”
At a time when even Mr. Trump acknowledged that the focus should be on millions of Americans in the path of the storm, the always-about-me president could not restrain himself for long. Angry at criticism of his response to Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico last year, he denied on Thursday that nearly 3,000 people had died, falsely calling it a made-up number by Democrats out to get him.民主党人想要报复他而编造的数据
His defiant rejection of the widely accepted count infuriated 激怒 the island’s leadership and even some Republican leaders in Congress. But it was hardly the first time Mr. Trump has dismissed consensus facts that do not fit his narrative 这恐怕不是特朗普第一次否定与其叙述不一致的社会共识. Mr. Trump’s version of his presidency总统任期 is one of unmatched无与伦比的, best-in-history victory after victory, never mind what history may say. What the people of Puerto Rico considered a calamity灾难, he saw as an “incredible unsung success.”
“He pushes back against the data on deaths, not because he’s upset by the loss of nearly 3,000 lives but because he’s terrified of responsibility, failure and blame,” said Michael D’Antonio, a Trump biographer. “Were someone else president, Trump would be the first to tweet an attack on an administration that struggled the way his did after Maria. Now he imagines that others will attack him, so he’s acting first.”
Ever since the storm, Mr. Trump has pushed back against criticism that his administration was slow to respond to Puerto Rico, where the distribution of supplies, gas and food lagged 滞后and power outages 中断 lasted for months, particularly compared with a swift and efficient response to an earlier hurricane that hit Texas. It was six days after Hurricane Maria hit the island before Mr. Trump pledged to go there, even as he traveled to Texas four days after Hurricane Harvey made landfall登陆. Full power was restored to homes only in August, nearly a year after the storm.
Former Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey, a Republican ally of Mr. Trump’s who was praised for his own leadership during Hurricane Sandy in 2012, said that Puerto Rico was an “extraordinary challenge” in part because the island’s infrastructure 基础设施 was in poor shape to begin with and that Mr. Trump resented being blamed for factors beyond his control.
“I think he’s frustrated by that,” Mr. Christie said in an interview. “When the president gets frustrated about something, he tweets. But I think the important thing to focus on both for him and for everybody else is: Is he acting in a way that’s responsible in getting people out of harm’s way and getting prepared for the storm” now thrashing the East Coast? He said Mr. Trump had done a good job in urging residents to flee Florence.
Few presidents go out of their way to admit mistakes or take responsibility when things go wrong, but Mr. Trump arrived in the White House 入主白宫 with a never-apologize rule and a penchant for bending facts to suit his needs. When good economic numbers were released under President Barack Obama, he said they could not be trusted. Now that the same agencies release good economic numbers on his watch, he cites them as proof of his success.
In a revealing moment in June, he said that if it turned out he was wrong about North Korea’s leader, Kim Jong-un, he probably would not acknowledge it but would instead would come up with a way to deflect blame推诿责任. “I don’t know that I’ll ever admit that,” he said, “but I’ll find some kind of an excuse.”
His defiance on the death toll also served as a reminder that there are few moments when the famously combative好事的 president does not relish a political fight 享受政治斗争 . Aside from trying to rewrite the history of Puerto Rico’s hurricane, he has over the past few days taken time out to publicly lash out 猛烈抨击 again at the Russia investigation, denounce谴责 Bob Woodward’s new book, assail former Secretary of State John Kerry and taunt 嘲讽 the Wall Street tycoon 巨头Jamie Dimon about running in 2020.参加2020年竞选
Veterans of natural disasters expressed chagrin 气愤 that the president was absorbed by political fights when the country needs nonpartisan leadership.
“In any emergency that you have or any moment of crisis, people need to know that their leaders are focused on what’s the most important thing, which is keeping them safe,” said former Gov. Terry McAuliffe of Virginia, a Democrat and close friend of Bill and Hillary Clinton’s. “Picking these political fights distracts the president’s attention from what really matters.”
Even some in Mr. Trump’s orbit regretted that he veered off topic. Thomas P. Bossert, who was the president’s homeland security adviser国土安全顾问 during Hurricane Maria last year, conceded承认 in an interview this week that Mr. Trump’s self-congratulation 沾沾自喜 should have been tempered with compassion.
“The missing part was empathy,” said Mr. Bossert, who was forced out of the administration earlier this year. “I wish he’d paused and expressed that instead of just focusing on the response success.”
After taping a message to residents in states that could be hit by Hurricane Florence and participating in a televised briefing from emergency officials earlier this week, Mr. Trump remained out of sight on Thursday. He announced on Twitter that he had received an update from emergency officials without inviting cameras as he did earlier in the week, although the White House released two pictures.？？？怎么翻译？
His claim on the death toll came in a pair of morning tweets. “3000 people did not die in the two hurricanes that hit Puerto Rico,” he said. Mr. Trump said the toll in Puerto Rico was only six to 18 dead after his visit there following the storm and that “as time went by it did not go up by much.” Democrats, he said, had padded the death toll by including, for example, a person who died of old age.
Mr. Trump’s visit to Puerto Rico last year was remembered partly for images of him tossing rolls of paper towels to bereft residents给失去亲人的居民递成卷的纸巾. The death toll has changed since then. Fatalities灾祸 were officially recorded as 64 for nearly a year, despite convincing evidence that the figure was too low because death certificates had failed to take into account the long-range impact of the storm.
In August, a review by researchers from George Washington University at the request of the Puerto Rican government compared death rates during the storm and its aftermath 余波 to normal rates and concluded that 2,975 more people died than would have otherwise. While this was a scientific extrapolation推断 rather than a list of specific names with specific causes, the Puerto Rican government accepted the estimate, as did lawmakers from both parties.
Puerto Rico’s leadership took issue with 与。。。争论 Mr. Trump’s dismissal of that number, as did several leading Florida Republicans, including Gov. Rick Scottand Senator Marco Rubio.
“We strongly denounce强烈谴责 anyone who would use this disaster or question our suffering for political purposes,” Gov. Ricardo A. Roselló of Puerto Rico said. “I ask the president to recognize the magnitude of Hurricane Maria and continue working with my government to ensure a full recovery of the American citizens of Puerto Rico.”
Representative议员 Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, a retiring Miami Republican, said that no one should distort the truth of what happened in Puerto Rico. “It might be a new low,” Ms. Ros-Lehtinen said of the president’s false claim, adding that only a “warped mind that would turn this statistic into fake news” about himself.
Mr. Bossert said that attributing thousands of deaths in Puerto Rico purely to the storm was a tricky business棘手的事情, a view privately held by many still serving in the Trump administration.
“The people that died — thousands of people — it’s terrible, but it’s always difficult to talk about the causality of that death,” Mr. Bossert said. He argued that the link between some of the fatalities reported死亡事故报告 and the storm might have been “correlative, and not necessarily causal,” such as the case of a person with a heart condition who died months later because of lack of sufficient access to clean water, electricity or medical care.
In some parts of Florida where highly contested midterm elections are just weeks away, the politics of Maria were hard to avoid. Since the storm, many Puerto Ricans have relocated to Floridaand are eligible to vote, making support from the Puerto Rican diaspora even more critical.
Representative Carlos Curbelo, a Republican from South Florida, said he did not understand why Mr. Trump would inaccurately state the death toll. “We should all be focused on what is about to happen in the Carolinas,” he said, “and not politicize hurricanes and hurricane relief不要使台风和台风救援变成政治手段.”
An earlier version of this article misstated when electricity was fully restored in Puerto Rico after Hurricane Maria. Power was restored in August — last month — not this month. An earlier version also misidentified the government entity that revised the territory’s death toll. 怎么翻译？？？The revised toll of 2,975 was accepted by the Puerto Rican government, not the federal government.
Eileen Sullivan, Julie Hirschfeld Davis and Nicholas Fandos contributed reporting.
网友评论