THE BURNED OVER DISTRICT

For some reason Cheeto Mussolini has the island of Puerto Rico in his sights just as surely as Hurricane Maria did. And the combined hurricane damage and Trump's relief failure is a one-two punch that American citizens should not get from their country.

President Trump’s approach to Puerto Rico since Hurricane Maria has been coherently inhumane. He has called some Puerto Rican leaders “politically motivated ingrates,” made insensitive references to how much federal money is being spent on recovery, refused to support equitable health-care access for the island’s 3.5 million U.S. citizens, bemoaned on Twitter how federal personnel could not be in the commonwealth after the hurricane “forever” and this week complained from the Rose Garden that the military is distributing food, “something that really they shouldn’t have to be doing.”

Only one notable deviation from this narrative stands out. While on his official trip to the island, Trump told Fox News correspondent Geraldo Rivera that Puerto Rican governments “owe a lot of money to your friends on Wall Street, and we’re going to have to wipe that out. You can say goodbye to that.” Hours later, the White House was back on track: “I wouldn’t take it word for word,” said Mick Mulvaney, director of the Office of Management and Budget.

A week later, congressional Republicans unveiled a relief plan that would only add to the island’s debt load.

The disjointed thread of off-the-cuff commentary Trump has issued in real time and on social media since the storm reveals either the president’s profound ignorance or his deep-seated prejudices. He seems fully unaware of the United States’ history of involvement in Puerto Rico; the nation took the island as booty after the Spanish-American War in 1898 and made us citizens without consulting our forebears in 1917, just one month before the country’s entry into World War I. For decades, the U.S. military was here — seemingly forever — using two small but inhabited islands as live ordnance ranges for the Navy. Trump, however, seems to believe that Puerto Rico is a foreign jurisdiction and hence, in his mind, U.S. tax dollars should not be spent to prop up the island’s fragile health-care system nor to save lives and rebuild in the aftermath of a major hurricane.

But if he is in fact aware of our standing as citizens — which he certainly should be — then perhaps he is simply treating Puerto Ricans as he has women, other Latinos, African Americans, Muslims, people with disabilities and any number of other groups

If the island location is confusing to Donny then we can only hope no disasters happen on Hawaii.