by Marc H Morial
President and CEO
National Urban League
“We always knew that MAGA and Trump were racist. We always knew how they had felt about the island. But to say it so grotesquely, in particular to Puerto Ricans who are independent voters and on the fence, I think it has reverberated.” – Camille Rivera, board member of the National Puerto Rican advocacy group La Brega y Fuerza
As a result of the Trump administration’s botched response to Hurricane Maria in 2017, more than 200,000 Puerto Ricans have migrated to the mainland U.S.
His campaign team apparently forgot that they, and the millions of other Puerto Ricans living in the states, are American citizens who can vote.
The now-infamous Trump rally at Madison Square Garden on Sunday included a staggering series of racist and misogynistic remarks from a series of speakers. But the one that has drawn the most reaction – and the only one Trump has disavowed – referred to Puerto Rico as a “floating island of garbage.”
The campaign claims the “joke” does not reflect the candidate’s views. But his actions as President tell a different story.
In fact, Trump wanted to “swap” Puerto Rico for Greenland “because, in his words, Puerto Rico was dirty and the people were poor,” his Department of Homeland Security Chief of Staff said.
Hurricane Maria was the deadliest natural disaster to hit the United States in a century, killing nearly 3,000 people and knocking out power to parts of Puerto Rico for almost a year.
In its aftermath, Trump withheld $20 billion in federal funding that Congress had allocated for the island, putting in place a burdensome process that had never before been required to receive disaster aid.
The bulk of the Congressionally-approved funding did not make its way to Puerto Rico until the Biden-Harris administration entered office.
Trump opposed a disaster-aid proposal that would have allowed FEMA to pay 100 percent of all Hurricane Maria disaster costs in Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands. Trump had threatened to veto the measure, but it failed in the Senate and never made it to his desk.
Mark Harvey, Trump’s senior director for resilience policy on the National Security Council, said the administration’s hesitance to provide relief to Puerto Rico was deliberate and political.
“It just goes into this pattern of, ‘We’re not awarding that, these aren’t my people,’” Harvey said. “That general sense of, ‘I am here to help my people, and these aren’t my people, so I don’t have a responsibility to help.’”
The image of Trump playfully tossing rolls of paper towels into a crowd in the wake of the devastation has become a symbol of his administration’s callousness toward Puerto Rico. And if any of the 900,000 Puerto Ricans living in swing states had forgiven or forgotten, Sunday’s rally brought it back.
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To Be Equal is a syndicated weekly column by National Urban League President Marc H. Morial, which is distributed to more than 400 newspapers and websites nationwide. Each week’s topic focuses on issues affecting both African American’s and the nation as a whole. Started in 1963 by CEO Whitney M. Young, Jr., as “The Voice of Black America,” the column was immediately picked up by major newspapers and radio stations across the country. Today, the To Be Equal column continues to present a unique insight on national and international issues.
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