This is fantastic news, Mr. President! We should let their relatives know that they aren’t dead.

President Donald Trump today announced, as you can see in the above tweet, that the Hurricane Maria death count had been inflated by Democrats in order to “to make (him) look bad”.

This, as I suspect most of you know, is absolute bullshit… and demonstrates just how far we’ve drifted from reality under the leadership of Donald “fake news” Trump.

While it’s true that there’s still some debate as to exactly how many people died as a result of Hurricane Maria, the consensus seems to be that roughly 3,000 people died in the six months after the storm made landfall… people who wouldn’t have died otherwise… in most cases because of infrastructure failures on the island. [Without food, clean water, and electricity, people don’t tend to live so long. This is especially true of the elderly.] In spite of these numerous studies, however, Donald Trump came out today claiming that these people hadn’t died as a result of Hurricane Maria and his administration’s anemic response. No, according to him, they hadn’t died at all. It was all just a lie fabricated by the Democrats.

What did we expect when we elected a man who lied about having the biggest crowd in United States history for his inaugural, when it was clear to anyone with eyes that this wasn’t the case? We knew there would be lies. We knew they would likely start small and grow over time, as that’s usually the ways with authoritarians. At first it’s funny. Then it’s not. And, now, we are in uncharted water, completely untethered from reality. I guess we should just be happy that, like his friend, the conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, he didn’t accuse the families of the “dead” of being “crisis actors” paid for by the likes of George Soros. But maybe that’s coming. We’ll have to see what he tweets tomorrow.

[above: President Trump can be see solving the problems of the Puerto Rican people by throwing paper towels at rescue workers two weeks after Hurricane Maria. This, it seems in retrospect, did not stop the elderly from dying.]

The good news is, very few people are standing with the President on this, his most recent assault on reality. Speaker of the House Paul Ryan came out today with a statement saying that there was no reason to question the death count as it had been calculated by public health researchers at multiple organizations. And even people as terrible as Florida’s Rick Scott have gone out of their way to distance themselves from Trump on the issue.

Wile it’s true that Ryan came out against the President on his claim that very few people had actually died in Puretro Rico as a result of the storm, the Speaker of the House did say that it was “really no one’s fault,” which, as we know, was also bullshit. The truth is, the Trump administration was slow to act in Puerto Rico and never allocated the resources that might have stopped things from escalating. And thousands died.

House Speaker Paul Ryan on Pres. Trump disputing a report on the Puerto Rico death toll: "There is no reason to dispute these numbers and it's a function of this was a devastating storm that hit an isolated island and that's really no one's fault" https://t.co/PvHxJMGqmq pic.twitter.com/AdxLhiXNRc

— Deena Zeina Zaru 👩🏻‍💻 (@Deena_Zaru) September 13, 2018

One more thing. I should add that it’s not just that people died after Donald Trump visited Puerto Rico, throwing paper towels and telling people what an awesome job he was doing. There’s also the little matter that we didn’t bother to learn from what happened in Puerto Rico, which makes it very likely that, the next time something like this happens, we’ll see even more death and destruction. Here, with more on that point, is an excerpt from the new episode of Pod Save America.

Dan Pfeiffer: “What happens in the real world is, if 3,000 Americans die due in some measure to government incompetence, Congress would look into it. There would be a committee investigation. And it would be bipartisan. The thing that is so disturbing about this… it’s not just about the allocation of blame… You’re doing this to make sure that it doesn’t fucking happen again. Becausue we live in an era of climate change. There is going to be hurricane after hurricane headed toward Puerto Rico. And people will die because this Republican Congress decided that they would rather ignore this problem than do the job that we pay them to do.”

Jon Favreau: “After Hurricane Katrina hit, Republican leaders on the relevant oversight committees held nine hearings about the federal response and obtained more than 500,000 documents from George W. Bush’s administration. And they prepared this detailed report a month later that (went into) how to fix the problems so that we’d never have another Katrina again. Republicans in this Congress haven’t requested a single document from the Trump White House, and haven’t held a single hearing on what happened.”