Rep. Bonnie Watson Coleman expressed outrage Wednesday at President Trump’s visit to Puerto Rico, saying his behavior in the storm-ravaged U.S. territory was “disgustingly inappropriate” and made her sick to her stomach.
Speaking with SiriusXM Progress host Dean Obeidallah, Ms. Coleman, a New Jersey Democrat, specifically took issue with Mr. Trump’s joke Tuesday about the response to the devastation of Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico throwing the federal budget “out of whack.”
“I think he is disgustingly inappropriate and unprepared,” she said, Raw Story first reported. “Those remarks regarding the budget were totally unnecessary.
“But I find he has a limited capacity to communicate without a teleprompter, and sometimes even with a teleprompter,” she continued. “So, it doesn’t surprise me when he says these things that someone would say who has no depth of thinking, no compassion, no moral core.
“He is absolutely disgusting, and he is an embarrassment as president of the United States of America, and he makes me sick to my stomach,” she added. “You know, he just can’t take any kind of a criticism. He has absolutely no connection with reality. He is an egotist, a narcissist and he is very incompetent. So if you put all those things together, you expect them to be nothing but inappropriate responses, reactions and statements coming from him. He doesn’t surprise me, he just disgusts me, that he just continues to sink lower and lower and lower and lower.”
Mr. Trump gave a press briefing Tuesday shortly after arriving in Puerto Rico to assess the recovery process, two weeks after a Category 4 hurricane hit the island, leaving nearly 3.5 million residents without power. Mr. Trump’s comments during the briefing have been criticized by Democrats who say he lacked compassion.
“I hate to tell you, Puerto Rico, but you are throwing our budget out of whack. We spent a lot of money on Puerto Rico, and that’s fine. We saved a lot of lives,” Mr. Trump said. “Every death is a horror, but if you look at a real catastrophe like Katrina and you look at the tremendous hundreds and hundreds of people that died and what happened here with a storm that was just totally overbearing. No one has ever seen anything like that.
“You can be very proud of all of your people and all of our people working together. Sixteen versus literally thousands of people,” he said, referring to the death count that stood at 16 at the time. It has since risen to 34.
Mr. Trump said in a series of tweets Wednesday morning that media coverage of his trip has been grossly unfair and that the people of Puerto Rico showed him “great warmth and friendship.”
• Jessica Chasmar can be reached at jchasmar@washingtontimes.com.
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