Trump’s Approval Rating on Hurricane Response Sinks 20 Points After Puerto Rico

Home
www.youtube.com

President Trump‘s approval rating for overseeing the federal government’s response to hurricanes fell by 20 points after Hurricane Maria devastated Puerto Rico, a CNN poll conducted by SSRS revealed.

Trump’s approval rating for responding to hurricanes Harvey and Irma stood at 64 percent in mid-September. Just a month later, the rating dropped to 44 percent.


The poll surveyed 1,010 respondents between Oct. 12 and Oct. 15 with a margin of error of plus or minus 3.5 percentage points.

Much of Puerto Rico remains in severe crisis nearly a month after the Category 4 storm hit. As of Tuesday, just 18 percent of the 3.4 million U.S. citizens living on the island have electricity, and 65 percent have access to potable water.

Compared to the actions taken after hurricane-ravaged Texas and Florida, the president has been heavily criticized for his Twitter attacks on Puerto Rican leaders, tossing paper towels into a crowd of hurricane victims, and contrasting Puerto Rico’s death toll to “a real catastrophe like Katrina.”

Trump insists he’s standing by Puerto Rico but has blamed its pre-existing infrastructure issues and debt for its problems with hurricane recovery.

Most recently, Trump said that the military should not have to distribute the “massive amounts” of food and water to the islanders.

“We have massive amounts of water. We have massive amounts of food, but they have to distribute the food, and they have to do this,” he said at his Rose Garden news conference on Monday.

“They have to distribute the food to the people of the island. So, what we’ve done is, we now actually have military distributing food—something that really they shouldn’t have to be doing.”

https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/statuses/912478274508423168

https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/statuses/918432809282342912

EcoWatch Daily Newsletter