It seems a remarkable thing to have to ask, but was the Trump administration's slow response to the devastation in Puerto Rico due to Trump's insistence on spending weekends at his posh golf resorts?
As Hurricane Maria made landfall on Wednesday, Sept. 20, there was a frenzy of activity publicly and privately. The next day, President Trump called local officials on the island, issued an emergency declaration and pledged that all federal resources would be directed to help.
But then for four days after that — as storm-ravaged Puerto Rico struggled for food and water amid the darkness of power outages — Trump and his top aides effectively went dark themselves.
Trump jetted to New Jersey that Thursday night to spend a long weekend at his private golf club there, save for a quick trip to Alabama for a political rally. Neither Trump nor any of his senior White House aides said a word publicly about the unfolding crisis.
Trump did hold a meeting at his golf club that Friday with half a dozen Cabinet officials — including acting Homeland Security secretary Elaine Duke, who oversees disaster response — but the gathering was to discuss his new travel ban, not the hurricane. Duke and Trump spoke briefly about Puerto Rico but did not talk again until Tuesday, an administration official said.
From the span of Thursday evening, when Trump left for his New Jersey golf resort, to Trump's White House return White House officials "would not say" whether Trump had any conversations with the officials directing the storm response. His first White House response to the disaster the next week was, according to the Washington Post's administration source, only after "becoming frustrated" by criticism on TV—upon which he unleashed a series of tweets.
From Thursday to Monday evening, there was no public statement from Trump on the hurricane or its aftermath. Four days of silence.
Are we seeing the results of Trump jetting off to his own private retreats for long stretches of time? It seems North Korea has already learned to time its missile launches to weekends, when Trump is reliably out golfing—was the Puerto Rico response, too, hindered by his compulsive need to visit his clubs?
It is deeply alarming to believe that the efficacy of the nation's disaster response efforts are contingent on the competence of a single leader, mind you, whether that leader be skilled or clownish, but even seemingly routine responses to the disaster, such as the dispatch of humanitarian Navy efforts and the temporary waiver of the Jones Act, took days longer to accomplish than in previous emergency efforts.
So at this point it's not outlandish to ask the question: Was the apparent four-day delay in the administration's disaster relief efforts brought about because Donald Trump went golfing?