Mayor Carmen Yulín Cruz criticized President Trump’s response to the coronavirus pandemic, comparing it to his response following hurricanes Maria and Irma in 2017.
“The President’s botched efforts after Hurricanes Irma and Maria cost the lives of approximately 3,000 Puerto Ricans. He then put the debt before the dead,” Cruz tweeted Tuesday night. “He is doing it again with his botched efforts in handling the COVID crisis & again it will cost thousands of lives.”
Cruz has been a frequent critic of both Trump’s response to the hurricanes and claims he has made that the estimates of nearly 3,000 deaths in the aftermath were “done by the Democrats in order to make me look as bad as possible when I was successfully raising Billions of Dollars to help rebuild Puerto Rico.”
In recent days, Trump has repeatedly suggested businesses and institutions that are closed due to the outbreak should try and reopen as soon as Easter Sunday, contradicting most public health officials, and he has repeatedly said the U.S. must not let “the cure be worse than the disease.”
On Tuesday, National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Director Anthony Fauci did not outright rule out the Easter target date but said, “You can look at a date but you’ve got to be very flexible and on a literally day-by-day and week-by-week basis. You need to evaluate the feasibility of what you’re trying to do.”
