We begin today’s roundup with The New York Times and its editorial on Donald Trump’s denial of thousands of deaths in Puerto Rico:
[T]here is little question that things could have been handled much better — Mr. Trump’s memorable chucking of paper towels at devastated islanders notwithstanding. Even the Federal Emergency Management Agency and the Government Accountability Office have found as much. [...]
Mr. Trump seems incapable of processing new information or learning from mistakes. Instead, he did what he always does: reject inconvenient data in favor of a story in which he is the hero. In the president’s view, increases in the official death toll cannot possibly stem from a more comprehensive analysis. They must stem from yet another conspiracy by his political enemies. The 3,000 lives lost, in other words, are all about him.
Democrats don’t need to lift a finger to make him look bad. He is managing that all on his own.
Here’s Van Newkirk’s take at The Atlantic:
I’ve talked to people in Puerto Rico who lost loved ones during Hurricane Maria. I’ve interviewed whole extended families struggling to locate one another and fearing for the worst, clinging to sporadic WhatsApp updates and making daily pilgrimages across the island to tiny archipelagos of cellphone service. I’ve heard stories of cousins who disappeared and people in nursing homes or on dialysis for whom the shock of the storm and the attrition of life without electricity proved deadly. I talked to doctors who were overwhelmed with critical and dying patients, and who soldiered on through darkness. There are pictures in the papers of the deceased, and as I’ve written about here, a slew of studies has attempted to capture just how many people did die. The exact number has been in contention, and no amount of exactness can quantify the exact scale of human loss. But what researchers, the Puerto Rican government, the Puerto Rican people, and people of any level of discernment agree on is that the number is large, and the scale is truly tragic.
The president of the United States is not one of those people of discernment.