The people of Puerto Rico likely thought hurricane recovery “was going to be easy” after seeing the response in Texas and Florida, budget director Mick Mulvaney said Sunday.
In an interview on CNN’s “State of the Union,” Mulvaney pushed back on criticism of President Donald Trump’s attack on San Juan mayor Carmen Yulin Cruz, and said it was “unfair to say that the president hasn’t given it his very best effort.
“There's more than 70 mayors on the island of Puerto Rico, and yet you seem to spend a lot of attention on the one from San Juan,” he said. “I think that's where the president's pushback is.”
He also said Trump isn’t criticizing Puerto Rico’s residents for not doing enough.
“I think what the president is trying to get at is, folks think this is going to be easy,” he said. “They saw what happened in Texas and Florida and they thought, ‘oh, this is easy to do.’ And it's not.”
“It's why we have 10,000 people on the island right now. . we're doing things on Puerto Rico that we didn't even do in Texas or Florida,” he added.
“This was always going to be harder. And we knew that, which is why we positioned assets on the island before the storm,” he said. “But I think it's possible that folks just said, ‘oh, this will be easy’ and it's not going to be easy, it's never going to be easy.”
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