Schumer: Trump’s Response to Puerto Rico ‘been Slow-Footed, Disorganized and Not Adequate’

Sunday on CBS’s “Face The Nation,” Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) said the response to Puerto Rico after Hurricane Maria by the Trump administration was “slow-footed, disorganized and not adequate.”

Partial transcript as follows:

JOHN DICKERSON: Welcome back to “Face the Nation.” We’re here with Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer. Senator, I want to start on Puerto Rico. There’s been a lot of criticism of the federal response, but the administration and Marco Rubio have said Puerto Rico is a special case. It’s not like Texas and Florida. There were existing challenges in Puerto Rico, a weak electrical grid, those kinds of things, that are really a part of evaluating what’s happening there.

CHUCK SCHUMER: Well, first of all, the president instead of tweeting against the mayor of San Juan who’s watching her people die and just made a plea for help ought to roll up his sleeves and get to work here. The bottom line is at least for the first week and a half the effort has been slow-footed, disorganized and not adequate. And that’s not just me saying it. General Buchanan said he doesn’t have enough troops or material. The acting secretary of HHS Duke when she visited said that things are not good.

And so the bottom line is that we need more help. Marco Rubio is right. We need control and command. That means many more military troops. Let me give you an example. In Haiti there were 22,000 troops after two weeks here. Right now there are 10,000. And those are very, very recent. So this has not been a good response.

It needs the president to stop calling names, stop downgrading the motives of people who are calling for help, but roll up his sleeves and get to work. And, by the way, he should have gone to Puerto Rico earlier than two weeks. He’ll go Tuesday. That’s good. But two weeks after it hit. He was in Texas twice after that. Obama was up at Sandy two days afterward. They say, “There are logistics that get in the way,” but the president going makes a huge difference. And logistics didn’t get in the way in the past.

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