Puerto Rico Was a Precursor for the Pandemic
One hundred thousand people are dead. There is no effective federal plan to control a pandemic for which there remains no cure, nor help the nation recover from it. President Trump is engaged in a daily exercise in willful failure, ridding his government of inspectors general and obfuscating his own negligence. In a job that typically helps lead the nation in moments of grief, this president opts to tweet and golf, needing to be pressured to finally lower the flag to half-staff last week. It is no surprise that so many Americans followed the lead of Trump and fellow Republicans who rushed to reopen their state economies, going in droves to shores and pools and shops like spring breakers, many without masks, as if vaccinated by their frustration and impatience.
The United States has seen death on this scale before, and it has ignored it before. Carmen Yulín Cruz couldn’t: She saw it up close.
Yulín is the mayor of San Juan, Puerto Rico, same as in 2017, when Hurricanes Irma and Maria devastated the island. Instead of getting the help they needed from Trump, Puerto Ricans got paper towel jump shots and petty tweets. Later, the president pushed forward with a deliberate, mean-spirited effort to steal aid from the very folks who still need it today.
Three years later, Mayor Yulín is living it again. This time, her fellow Americans can empathize in a different way.
“While we were dying in Puerto Rico because of his incompetence after Hurricane Maria, Trump played golf. While people are dying of COVID-19 because of his incompetence, again, Trump plays golf,” Yulín said during her interview with Rolling Stone. “His lack of actions, his lack of respect for scientific data result in the death of thousands. People have died because President Trump is an Incompetent in Chief.”
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https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/political-commentary/puerto-rico-was-trump-covid-prelude-1005323/
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