Trump’s America never stops being a weird and confusing place, but it got weirder and more confusing on Thursday when Trump tweeted what amounts to a conspiracy theory involving the death toll in Puerto Rico as a result of Hurricane Maria last year.
So while Hurricane Florence is presently hitting North and South Carolina, Trump was still talking about last year’s big storm. And in his monologue on “The Late Show” Thursday night, Stephen Colbert was pretty mad about it.
“President Trump has been laser focused on hurricane response this week. Just not this one. He’s talking about the one a year ago, because he’s been tweeting a lot about what a great job he did responding to Hurricane Maria, that decimated Puerto Rico last year, resulting in the death of almost 3,000 American citizens,” Colbert said. “It’s really hard to imagine anything more horrible than that. Other than this tweet.”
Here are the Trump tweets in question.
3000 people did not die in the two hurricanes that hit Puerto Rico. When I left the Island, AFTER the storm had hit, they had anywhere from 6 to 18 deaths. As time went by it did not go up by much. Then, a long time later, they started to report really large numbers, like 3000…
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) September 13, 2018
…..This was 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. If a person died for any reason, like old age, just add them onto the list. Bad politics. I love Puerto Rico!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) September 13, 2018
As Colbert read the tweets out loud in his Trump voice, the crowd booed loudly.
“Yes, you’re my favorite bunch of lying, ungrateful fake dead people. I like Puerto Ricans who don’t die,” Colbert said, still in the Trump voice and referencing Trump’s “I like people who weren’t captured” crack about John McCain from 2015.
“I just wanna state that not only is this a sickening tweet, it is in no way true,” Colbert continued before detailing where that death toll number came from. “At the government’s request, researchers at George Washington University’s Milken Institute of Public Health did a study and estimated that 2,975 people died as a result of the disaster and its effects, which unfolded over months.
“And it had been pushed out of the front pages, because of all the other bad news about Donald Trump. Then he brought it up again. It’s kinda like he was on trial for littering and he said on the stand, ‘I only threw that cup out of my window because I was distracted by the homeless man I ran over. Pretty sure he died of old age.’ “
You can watch this portion of Colbert’s monologue from Thursday’s episode of “The Late Show” in the video embedded at the top of this post.