A conservative columnist for The Washington Post compared President Donald Trump’s recent social media comments regarding hurricane fatalities in Puerto Rico last year to Holocaust denial, and accused the president of not caring about the deaths of Latinos and non-voters.
Jennifer Rubin, a former writer for conservative outlets including The Weekly Standard and Human Events, excoriated President Trump over the weekend, telling MSNBC on Saturday the president was responsible for the deaths in Puerto Rico during Hurricane Maria last year.
“Donald Trump has killed those people twice: once through neglect and oversight; secondly, disgracing that they died at all.”
“If they’re not voters and they’re not white, he doesn’t give a darn.”
Rubin also compared Trump’s comments to “Holocaust denial”.
“That’s what death denial, that’s what Holocaust denial, that’s what all of these denial syndromes are all about – it’s killing the person twice.”
On Saturday, President Trump disputed the numbers of Puerto Ricans killed as a result of Hurricane Maria and criticized the methodology used to reach the latest estimates of just over 3,000.
“‘When Trump visited the island territory last October, OFFICIALS told him in a briefing 16 PEOPLE had died from Maria.’ The Washington Post,” Trump tweeted.
“This was long AFTER the hurricane took place. Over many months it went to 64 PEOPLE. Then, like magic, ‘3000 PEOPLE KILLED.’ They hired GWU Research to tell them how many people had died in Puerto Rico (how would they not know this?). This method was never done with previous hurricanes because other jurisdictions know how many people were killed. FIFTY TIMES LAST ORIGINAL NUMBER - NO WAY!”
A long-time critic of the president, Rubin drew criticism from fellow conservatives during the 2016 presidential campaign and after President Trump’s election. In December 2017, National Review’s Charles Cooke noted that Rubin, who had for years championed the idea of moving the US embassy Jerusalem, and chided Trump for delaying the move, dismissed the president’s decision to relocate the embassy as irrelevant.
Rubin, once a staunch supporter of former Ambassador to the United Nations John Bolton who, warned that his appointment as National Security Advisor was a “wake-up call” to Republicans “who always assumed wise, calm advisers would be there to constrain Trump”. This, despite her suggestion in December, 2011 that Bolton run for president, and support in December 2016 for Bolton as NSA.