San Juan Mayor Carmen Yulín Cruz slams Trump for claiming thousands didn’t die in Hurricane Maria

The mayor of the capital of Puerto Rico has called President Donald Trump “delusional” for claiming thousands of Americans did not die in Hurricane Maria.

Mr Trump tweeted on Thursday that “3000 people did not die in the two hurricanes that hit Puerto Rico” last September – a rejection of his own government’s assessment that 2,975 people died as a result of Hurricane Maria and the months-long recovery that followed.

The president claimed the recently updated death toll was “done by the Democrats in order to make me look as bad as possible,” adding: “If a person died for any reason, like old age, just add them onto the list. Bad politics. I love Puerto Rico!”

San Juan Mayor Carmen Yulín Cruz, who has sparred frequently with Mr Trump about his response to hurricane, responded with a tweet of her own, calling the president “delusional, paranoid, and unhinged from any sense of reality”.

“This is NOT about politics this was always about SAVING LIVES,” she added.

The government updated the death toll from Hurricane Maria last month, in light of the finding by researchers at George Washington University’s Milken Institute School of Public Health that nearly 3,000 more people died in the six months after the storm than usually would have during that period. The results supported a Harvard University study that found thousands more people died as a result of the storm than originally predicted.

But Mr Trump has refused to back down from his claim that the government did a “great job” in its response to Puerto Rico, where power was only fully restored in August – nearly a year after the hurricane hit.

On Tuesday, days after the Government Accountability Office released a report showing that more than half the federal workers deployed to disaster zones at the time were known to be unqualified, Mr Trump called the recovery effort “incredibly successful”.

"It was one of the best jobs that's ever been done with respect to what this is all about,” he said at a briefing.

Ms Yulín Cruz was an outspoken critic of the administration's response to Hurricane Maria in the direct aftermath of the storm, as well as in the months that followed. She first earned the president’s ire in a press conference days after the hurricane hit, when she begged for help and claimed the government was “killing us with the inefficiency”.

The politicians seem not to have lost their animosity in the intervening months, with Mr Trump calling the mayor “totally incompetent” in a tweet on Wednesday.

“We got A Pluses for our recent hurricane work in Texas and Florida (and did an unappreciated great job in Puerto Rico, even though an inaccessible island with very poor electricity and a totally incompetent Mayor of San Juan),” he wrote.

In reference to Hurricane Florence, which was expected to strike the East Coast any day, he added: “We are ready for the big one that is coming!”