Stephen Colbert Slams Donald Trump’s Tweets About Hurricane Deaths In Puerto Rico

By Martin Holmes. Published: 14 Sep 2018 10:47 AM

Stephen Colbert has called the recent tweets by Donald Trump “sickening” as the U.S. president denied the reported number of deaths caused by last year’s hurricane in Puerto Rico.

“I just wanna state that not only is this a sickening tweet, it is in no way true,” Colbert said in his opening monologue on Thursday’s edition of “The Late Show”.

Colbert was referring to tweets Trump made on Thursday disputing the reported death toll in Puerto Rico after Hurricane Maria:

3000 people did not die in the two hurricanes that hit Puerto Rico. When I left the Island, AFTER the storm had hit, they had anywhere from 6 to 18 deaths. As time went by it did not go up by much. Then, a long time later, they started to report really large numbers, like 3000…

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) September 13, 2018

Trump claimed the numbers were boosted “by the Democrats” in an effort to make him “look as bad as possible”:

…..This was done by the Democrats in order to make me look as bad as possible when I was successfully raising Billions of Dollars to help rebuild Puerto Rico. If a person died for any reason, like old age, just add them onto the list. Bad politics. I love Puerto Rico!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) September 13, 2018

As the late-night host pointed out, Puerto Rican officials had asked researchers at George Washington University’s Milken Institute School of Public Health to conduct a study into the deaths, the results of which found that an estimated 2,975 died as a result of the disaster.

Colbert stated that the report “had been pushed out of the front pages because of all the other bad news about Donald Trump.”

“It’s kinda like he was on trial for littering, and he said on the stand, ‘I only threw that cup out of my window because I was distracted by the homeless man I ran over. Pretty sure he died of old age.'”