Trump Lashes Out at Puerto Rico

Mayor Who Criticized Storm

Response

WASHINGTON — President Trump lashed out at the mayor of San Juan on

Saturday for criticizing his administration’s efforts to help Puerto Rico after
Hurricane Maria, accusing her of “poor leadership” and implying that the
island, which lacks electricity and has limited cellphone service, water and
fuel, was not doing enough to help itself.
In a series of early-morning messages on Twitter from his New Jersey golf
club, where he is spending the weekend, Mr. Trump dismissed the statements
by the capital’s mayor, Carmen Yulín Cruz, as political and asserted that his
administration had organized a response by federal workers who are “doing a
fantastic job.”
Mr. Trump said his critics in Puerto Rico should not depend entirely on the
federal government. “They want everything to be done for them when it
should be a community effort,” he wrote. “10,000 Federal workers now on
Island doing a fantastic job. The military and first responders, despite no
electric, roads, phones etc., have done an amazing job. Puerto Rico was totally
destroyed.”
The seemingly slow response to the hurricane in Puerto Rico, an American
territory — especially compared with the federal response to storms in Texas
and Florida — threatened to become a political disaster for Mr. Trump as
critics compared it to President George W. Bush’s handling of Hurricane
Katrina in 2005. Mr. Trump has alternated between expressions of resolve and
concern on the one hand and angry recriminations against critics on the other.
Ms. Cruz became a powerful voice of grievance on Friday when she went on
television to plead for help and reject assertions by the Trump administration
about how well it was responding. She was incensed by comments made by
Elaine Duke, the acting secretary of Homeland Security, who had said on
Thursday that it was “really a good news story in terms of our ability to reach
people and the limited number of deaths” from the hurricane.
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“This is, dammit, this is not a good news story,” Ms. Cruz said on CNN.
“This is a ‘people are dying’ story. This is a ‘life or death’ story. This is
‘there’s a truckload of stuff that cannot be taken to people’ story. This is a
story of a devastation that continues to worsen.”

This right-wing strategy has been used to pressure Facebook since before the
presidential election. It was revealed in April 2016, for example, that Facebook
was employing a small team of contractors to vet its “trending topics,”
providing quality control such as weeding out blatant fake news. A single source
from that team claimed it had censored right-wing content, and a conservative
uproar ensued, led by organizations like Breitbart. Mr. Zuckerberg promptly
convened an apologetic meeting with right-wing media personalities and other
prominent conservatives to assure them the site was not biased against them.

Facebook got rid of those contractors, who were already too few for meaningful
quality control. So what did it do to stem the obvious rise in the scale and scope
of misinformation, fake news and even foreign state meddling on the site in the
months leading up to the election? Clearly not enough — for fear, no doubt, that
it would again be accused of bias.

After the election, Mr. Zuckerberg characterized the suggestion that such
misinformation campaigns played an important role in the election to be a
“crazy idea.” This week, Mr. Zuckerberg reconsidered that comment, saying it
was too dismissive. But his latest comments are still too dismissive, portraying
those of us who are worried about misinformation campaigns and deception
online as intolerant censors bothered by “ideas and content.”
A more astute observer of American politics than Mr. Zuckerberg might
consider that Mr. Trump’s comments are part of an effort to depict Facebook as
anti-conservative, lest outrage about the company’s role in the 2016 election
prompt the site to adopt policies that would make a repeat of 2016 more
difficult.

For those of us who are tolerant of a wide range of ideas and arguments, but
would still like deception and misinformation to not have such an easy foothold
in society, Mr. Zuckerberg’s comments do not inspire hope. Indeed, people
across the political spectrum should be able to agree that not making it so easy,
and so lucrative, for fake news to spread widely is better for all of us, since fake
news isn’t necessarily a right-wing phenomenon But since Facebook has no
effective competition, we can look forward only to being lectured on being more
tolerant of “ideas” we don’t like, and to smug talk of the false equivalency of
“both sides.”