Annie Karni and Patricia Mazzei

Trump’s latest invective toward the local leaders of an island devastated by a hurricane in September 2017 came in a torrent of tweets, which began Monday night and spilled into Tuesday morning. Trump was reacting after the Senate on Monday blocked billions of dollars in disaster aid for Midwestern states, in part because Democrats said a proposed $600 million in nutritional assistance to Puerto Rico fell short of its needs.

“Puerto Rico got far more money than Texas &amp; Florida combined, yet their government can’t do anything right, the place is a mess — nothing works,” Trump wrote on Twitter. He also stated, incorrectly, that Puerto Rico had received $91 billion in aid from the federal government.

In fact, FEMA and other agencies have so far distributed $11.2 billion in aid to Puerto Rico, according to the Office of Management and Budget. Some $41 billion in aid has been allocated, while $91 billion is the budget office’s estimate of how much the island could receive over the next two decades.

Gov. Ricardo A. Rosselló of Puerto Rico, a Democrat, responded to Trump in a tweet of his own Tuesday. “Mr. President, once again, we are not your adversaries, we are your citizens,” Rosselló wrote.

Trump has long been sensitive when it comes to the subject of Puerto Rico, where the U.S. government’s response to Hurricane Maria was widely criticized as too slow. Aides and allies said Trump had vented privately that Puerto Ricans had complained too much, and he had also noted privately that Hurricane Maria, which killed 2,975 people as a result of the storm and its effects, was not as bad as Hurricane Katrina, in which fewer people — 1,833 — were killed.

Trump has long hit back at Cruz, who during the disaster became the most outspoken critic of the federal response.

On Tuesday, Trump seemed to imply in his tweets that Puerto Rico was not part of the United States, noting that local elected officials “only take from USA.” Hogan Gidley, a White House spokesman, seemed to underscore the view in the White House that Puerto Ricans were not Americans when he twice referred to the island as “that country” during an appearance on MSNBC.

Trump’s apparent disdain for the island’s leadership has led to a breakdown of communication between local officials and the White House.

For weeks, Rosselló has asked the White House for a private meeting with Trump to lay out the island’s case for why it desperately needs federal funds for rebuilding after Hurricane Maria. But Rosselló’s request has gone unanswered, and he has tried instead to communicate with the president publicly, saying in cable news interviews, in official appearances and on Twitter that he fears Trump has been misled about Puerto Rico’s needs.

Rosselló’s fight may be an uphill battle with a president who has made it clear that he views more federal aid to Puerto Rico as throwing money away. His advisers also view the pleas from local officials as part of a campaign to shift the blame for what they view as severe mismanagement of the supplies and money sent after the storm.

In an interview Tuesday, Rosselló mentioned, unprompted, that Puerto Rico’s population was almost entirely Latino and said that historically, there have been “ethnic undertones” to the treatment of Puerto Ricans by Washington. “We don’t want special treatment,” he said. “We just want equal treatment.”

The governor also has bigger issues to deal with at home: The resignations of two power players in his Cabinet became public late Monday. Julia Keleher, the education secretary, and Héctor M. Pesquera, the public safety secretary, had been among the least popular members of Rosselló’s government. Their departures dominated the headlines in the local news media, which made little reference to what is widely seen here as yet another episode of presidential bluster.

That is not to say Puerto Ricans necessarily disagree with Trump’s criticism of the commonwealth’s leaders, even if many locals dislike the president himself, or the disdainful way he sometimes refers to the island.

“We have a political caste that is opportunistic and extremely corrupt,” said Eduardo Lalo, a well-known local novelist, humanities professor and opinion columnist who supports Puerto Rican independence. “What the president says, of course it’s clumsy and tremendously vulgar, and he says it for reasons of his own that are not substantive. But it’s also objective.”

The truth is, he said, “Puerto Rico is a colony of the United States, and therefore its hands are completely tied.”

At a bakery in the comfortable San Juan neighborhood of Ocean Park on Tuesday, the morning crowd was hardly abuzz about Trump’s comments, though people had noticed them.

One patron, Miguel Rodríguez, 54, pulled out his cellphone to show how, moments earlier, a friend had posted on Facebook that she agreed with the president for the first time in praising Puerto Ricans but labeling their leaders as “corrupt.”

Rodríguez, the owner of a company that installs security systems, scrolled down to the comment he left under his friend’s post: “We do not lack resources, we have too many thieves.”

“The government wants to keep demanding money from the government of the United States,” Rodríguez said. “But much of that help doesn’t reach the people.”

Politically, Rosselló is in an unenviable position experienced by all of his predecessors: Puerto Rico cannot get funding even for its food stamp program without approval from Congress, but it has no congressional representation to make its case in Washington. (Rep. Jenniffer González-Colón, a Republican, has no vote in the House.) None of the previous governors, however, had to deal with the dire consequences of a devastating hurricane in the middle of a government bankruptcy.

“Neither Trump nor any president of the United States nor any official in the United States has assumed the responsibility it has with Puerto Rico,” Lalo said. “The great tragedy of the Puerto Rican people is that for 120 years, it calls Washington, and no one picks up the phone.”

Rosselló, who is up for re-election next year, has faced intense criticism on the island for trying to work cooperatively with Trump even as the president was repeatedly deriding Puerto Rican leaders.

Last week, the governor amped up his language against Trump, appearing to refer to him as a “bully” in an interview with CNN.

“If the bully gets close, I’ll punch the bully in the mouth,” he said. “It would be a mistake to confuse courtesy with courage.”

He later characterized his comments as a “metaphor.”

Trump has refrained from going after Rosselló by name, preferring to focus his attention on Cruz, his political nemesis since her outspoken comments criticizing the Trump administration’s failure to provide swift and meaningful help in the weeks after Hurricane Maria.

After Trump called Cruz “crazed and incompetent” on Twitter on Monday, she fired back, calling him “unhinged.”

“He can huff &amp; puff all he wants, but he cannot escape the death of 3,000 on his watch,” she wrote. “SHAME ON YOU!”

Cruz recently declared her candidacy for governor. She and several other candidates are hoping to unseat Rosselló in 2020. He is a supporter of Puerto Rican statehood; she is not.

“When he doesn’t get his way, he tries to pit people against each other,” Cruz said in an interview Tuesday. “Three thousand people died under his watch, and he has never acknowledged it. He’s now trying to weaponize help — and, in his desperation, he’s lying about it.”

Calling Puerto Rican leaders “corrupt” reflects poorly on Trump’s own administration, she added.

“If he thinks that the money that has come to Puerto Rico is money that we shouldn’t have received, then he doesn’t trust FEMA,” she said. “He shows his inability to lead and that he is incapable of understanding how his own government works.”

This article originally appeared in <a id="b1f80b79-9605-46ce-92e4-37590bd9d671" href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/02/us/puerto-rico-trump-san-juan-mayor-rossello.html">The New York Times</a>.

Trump Lashes Out Again at Puerto Rico, Bewildering the Island

WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump on Tuesday lashed out at Puerto Rico’s local lawmakers as “grossly incompetent” and singled out one of his favorite targets, Carmen Yulín Cruz, the mayor of San Juan, as “crazed and incompetent.”

Trump lashes out again at Puerto Rico, bewildering the island

People familiar with Trump’s thinking said he was skeptical that additional aid would not be used to pay down Puerto Rico’s debt. The acting White House chief of staff, Mick Mulvaney, who has made it clear that he believes Puerto Rico will need to find its own way out of the debt crisis, is believed to be encouraging the president’s negative view of the island.

In Puerto Rico, however, Trump’s stance is being viewed through the lens of race. In an interview Tuesday, Rosselló mentioned, unprompted, that Puerto Rico’s population was almost entirely Latino and said that historically, there have been “ethnic undertones” to the treatment of Puerto Ricans by Washington. “We don’t want special treatment,” he said. “We just want equal treatment.”

One patron, Miguel Rodríguez, 54, pulled out his cellphone to show how, moments earlier, a friend had posted on Facebook that she agreed with the president for the first time in praising Puerto Ricans but labeling their leaders “corrupt.”

This article originally appeared in <a id="45da3160-b956-47a4-90b7-edad2f9fe32a" href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/02/us/puerto-rico-trump-san-juan-mayor-rossello.html">The New York Times</a>.

Trump lashes out again at Puerto Rico, bewildering the Island

Trump’s latest invective toward the local leaders of an island devastated by a hurricane in September 2017 came in a torrent of tweets, which began Monday night and spilled into Tuesday morning. Trump was reacting after the Senate on Monday blocked billions of dollars in disaster aid for Midwestern states, in part because Democrats said a proposed $600 million in nutritional assistance to Puerto Rico fell short.

On Tuesday, Trump seemed to imply in his tweets that Puerto Rico was not part of the United States, noting that local elected officials “only take from USA.”

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/02/us/puerto-rico-trump-san-juan-mayor-rossello.html" id="4c53a770-d66a-3554-aeaa-070345388e75">The New York Times</a>.

<h1>MIAMI — President Donald Trump, speaking to the Venezuelan community in Miami on Monday, put an overtly political gloss on his administration’s push for Venezuela’s leftist president to step aside, casting that country’s turmoil as a cautionary tale for those who would embrace socialism.</h1>

“Socialism has so completely ravaged this great country that even the world’s largest reserves of oil are no longer enough to keep the lights on,” Trump said. “This will never happen to us.”

Trump used the speech to send yet another warning to President Nicolás Maduro that his days were numbered.

But in South Florida, home to the largest population of Venezuelans in the country, his remarks were also seen as a bid to win over what may be a critical bloc of voters in the 2020 presidential race.

The speech was also squarely in keeping with the president’s recent adoption of “socialist” as an all-purpose epithet for his newly empowered Democratic adversaries in the House.

Many Democratic lawmakers in South Florida have also called for Maduro’s ouster. But the White House has repeatedly opted not to invite Democrats to official events on Venezuela. And in his speech Monday, Trump went out of his way to praise a slew of Republican officials.

To Democrats, all that suggests the president may be more interested in wooing Venezuelan-Americans and other Latino voters than in promoting bipartisanship on the Maduro issue.

“I’m concerned about the Trump administration politicizing this issue, using Venezuelans’ suffering to score political points here in Florida,” said Rep. Debbie Mucarsel-Powell, D-Fla. "We shouldn’t be using this as a political weapon.”

Florida is a swing state in which elections are often won or lost by tiny margins, and Trump officials see a golden opportunity. If they succeed in driving Maduro from office, they believe, they may turn Venezuelan-Americans into Republican voters, much like Cuban-Americans before them. Until now, Venezuelans have been seen as leaning Democratic.

The most emotional moment of the speech Monday came when Trump invited to the stage the mother of a rebel police officer who was killed by government forces in Venezuela last year.

“I apologize if I start crying,” Aminta Pérez said in Spanish as she took the microphone, pledging to continue her son’s work until “we see a free Venezuela.”

“Justicia!” the crowd chanted.

A president often associated with a wall on the southern border seemed happy to welcome the Spanish speaker standing next to him.

“I don’t know what she said — but I think I know what she said,” Trump said, vowing that Pérez’s son, Óscar Pérez, did not die in vain.

The president appeared to bask in the boisterous reception he got from about 1,000 people waving American, Venezuelan and Nicaraguan flags.

“I am thrilled to be back in the state I love with so many proud, freedom-loving patriots,” he said.

The political overtones were impossible to ignore.

Throngs of excited supporters wore red “Make America Great Again” hats. Loudspeakers blared the same songs as in Trump’s rallies. And a stream of speakers before the president used socialism as a campaign-season cudgel.

“These Democrats like to call themselves progressive,” said Sen. Rick Scott, R-Fla. “They’re regressive.”

In the United States, as the Democratic Party moves left, putting forward ambitious climate change proposals like the Green New Deal, Trump has branded party members as socialists.

He has employed similar language against Maduro.

“We condemn the brutality of the Maduro regime, whose socialist policies have turned that nation from being the wealthiest in South America into a state of abject poverty and despair,” the president said in his State of the Union address this month.

But what might serve the president’s political goals in the United States might backfire when it comes to foreign policy. At least before the speech in Miami, some administration officials said they were concerned that politicizing the issue at home might actually prop up Maduro in Venezuela, where he is unpopular even among supporters of Hugo Chávez, the former Venezuelan president who founded the country’s socialist party.

And the Venezuelan opposition leader, Juan Guaidó, is hardly a right-wing figure, backing social policies that would likely be considered left of center in the United States.

“The politics are not left and right,” said Eric Farnsworth, vice president of the Americas Society and Council of the Americas in Washington. “I don’t consider Maduro a leftist. I consider him an authoritarian. This is more about Florida politics.”

Trump was in Florida for Presidents Day weekend, and the speech at Florida International University marked a rare disruption of his familiar routine in Palm Beach, where he had spent the past two days shuttling between his private club, Mar-a-Lago, and the Trump International Golf Club.

On Monday morning, Trump appeared more preoccupied with the Justice Department than with the crisis in Venezuela. He fired off five early morning tweets, calling reported discussions there about using the 25th Amendment to remove him from power “illegal and treasonous.”

Over the weekend, Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., made a surprise visit to the Colombian border city Cúcuta and played down the possibility of an invasion. But in his speech, the president appeared to offer veiled threats.

Trump said, “We seek a peaceful transition of power, but all options are open.”

Rubio sounded a more pacific tone in Colombia.

“The only invasion that people have talked about around me is an invasion of food and medicine,” he said.

The senator also played down any link between the Venezuelan crisis and the political map at home.

“I have no idea what the long-term domestic political ramifications of this are,” he said.

This article originally appeared in <a id="8822b737-1626-400c-82fe-73a92e24a9e6" href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/18/world/americas/trump-maduro-miami-speech.html">The New York Times</a>.

As Trump Attacks Maduro, Some See Bid for Florida Votes

Trump used the speech to send yet another warning to President Nicolás Maduro that his days were numbered.

As Trump attacks Maduro, some see bid for Florida votes

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