As the Puerto Rico disaster reaction continues, it looks like Trump isn’t really into it. From CNBC:
President Donald Trump on Saturday lashed out at the mayor of San Juan and other officials in storm-ravaged Puerto Rico, contemptuous of their claims of a laggard U.S. response to the natural disaster that has imperiled the island’s future.
“They want everything to be done for them when it should be a community effort,” Trump said in a series of tweets a day after the capital city’s leader appealed for help “to save us from dying.”
“Such poor leadership ability by the Mayor of San Juan, and others in Puerto Rico, who are not able to get their workers to help,” Trump said.
The tweets amounted to a biting response to San Juan Mayor Carmen Yulin Cruz, who had accused the Trump administration of “killing us with the inefficiency” after Hurricane Maria. She implored the president, who is set to visit the U.S. territory on Tuesday, to “make sure somebody is in charge that is up to the task of saving lives.”
Trump has pledged to spare no effort to help Puerto Rico recover from Maria’s ruinous aftermath, and tweeted that military personnel and first responders had done “an amazing job,” despite having “no electric, roads, phones etc.”
Ignoring the personalities and politics involved, that last paragraph does raise an important point that, in the future, will be exacerbated by the forecast increasing violence of weather phenomena: what’s an appropriate metric for measuring our response to such disasters?
I mean, is it the number of lives lost after the incident has occurred?
Is it the number of lives lost during the incident?
Speed of response?
Magnitude of response?
Think about it – we’re starting to deal with disasters of a magnitude with which we’re certainly unfamiliar; in some cases, the severity will be unprecedented. And while I think Trump is, at his foundation, completely incompetent for the job of President, I do not care to follow into the condemnation trap.
That is, how hard is this particular problem to solve? How do we measure his response vs that of Hurricane Sandy vs that of Hurricane Katrina? Are those storms comparable? How does an island complicate matters? How does the damage to the mainland complicate our response to the damage to the island?
It’s worth contemplating. Right now, unless the commentator has some direct experience in major disaster relief, like Ret. Lt. Gen. Russel Honoré, it’s hard to see the accusations – or Trump’s claims of an expeditious response – and anything more than a case of one person’s word against another over an incident we didn’t experience.
Maybe it’s the engineer in me, but we really need a way to measure the competency of the Federal response to disasters that is independent of the person doing the measurement. It’s fundamental not only for measuring the competency of the people in charge, but also for improving our response.
And that will be critical in the future.
