Trump says his response to the hurricane that killed almost 3,000 people was 'incredibly successful'

With a monster hurricane spinning towards the east coast, President Donald Trump took a moment during a briefing on Tuesday to herald the awful, delayed response to 2017's Hurricane Maria as an "unsung success," sparking outrage online.

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Calling it "one of the best jobs that's ever been done with respect to what this is all about," Trump is ignoring what was, in fact, a dreadful response that cost more lives than what the storm death toll originally claimed.

At the time, the administration committed to a more aggressive response to storms that struck Texas, even as that situation there became more manageable and Puerto Rico desperately needed more assistance.

But perhaps worst of all is the fact that Trump is using words like "tremendous" and "success" to describe a response to a storm that ultimately killed almost 3,000 people, more than the roughly 1,800 killed by Hurricane Katrina and about the same number of people who were killed in the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001.

As far as Trump's response is concerned, the most lasting image of his involvement with Hurricane Maria will be the time he visited Puerto Rico and threw rolls of paper towels to survivors.

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As one could imagine, Trump's egregiously tone-deaf statement on Tuesday did not go over well on Twitter.

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None of this gives us any confidence in how Trump will respond to Hurricane Florence's landfall, which is projected to hit somewhere along the Carolina coast later this week.