WASHINGTON — After back-to-back hurricanes ravaged Puerto Rico in 2017, President Trump was so resistant to spending billions of dollars to restore the territory that he suggested simply getting rid of it instead. “Can we sell the island?” he asked aides, according to a cabinet member who was there.
Three years later, after repeated Twitter outbursts, angry recriminations, blocked aid and a paper towel-throwing visit that went over badly, Mr. Trump sought on Friday to present himself as a friend of Puerto Rico, announcing the release of $13 billion to rebuild its electric grid and repair schools a mere 1,095 days after the second of the hurricanes made landfall.
The most important date on the calendar, though, may not be the day the storms swept through the island but the day that islanders will render their judgment on the president’s leadership. Puerto Ricans who fled the island now make up an increasingly critical voting bloc in Florida, a must-win state for Mr. Trump as he seeks re-election in November. Mr. Trump’s abrupt aid announcement came just two days after former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr., his Democratic challenger, visited Florida seeking Hispanic votes.
The president made no mention on Friday of his searing feuds with Puerto Rican leaders nor his eagerness to divest the United States of the territory. Instead, he said reconstruction of the electric grid was long overdue — “that should have been done many years ago” — without acknowledging that his administration held up aid for it. “I’m the best thing that ever happened to Puerto Rico,” he insisted with no trace of irony. “Nobody even close.”
Few others would agree with that claim, even though Puerto Rico’s government made a point of politely thanking the administration after the announcement and ignoring the past disputes. Others pointed to the president’s re-election campaign as the real motive for finally releasing the aid.
“The Trump administration delayed, dragged its feet and resisted allocating these badly needed funds,” said Representative Nydia M. Velázquez, Democrat of New York, who was born in Puerto Rico. “Now, 46 days before the election, the administration has finally seen fit to release these funds.”
Mr. Biden’s campaign called it “a desperate political stunt” to win over voters. “For the thousands of families that had to leave the island, for all those we’ve lost, for those who still struggle everyday to keep a roof over their heads and food on the table, it is three years too little and too late,” said Tatiana Matta, an adviser to Mr. Biden.
José Caraballo-Cueto, an economics professor at the University of Puerto Rico who has studied federal disaster aid to the island after Hurricane Maria, noted that Friday’s grant amounted to a disbursement of money already allocated by Congress.
“If it were me, I would not feel so proud, three years later, to do something that I should have done a long time ago,” he said. “It was long overdue, this grant, especially for all these people who still have a blue tarp on their houses.”
If the president truly wanted to help Puerto Ricans with new aid, Mr. Caraballo said, he could approve earthquake assistance for residents of municipalities that were not included in the federal government’s disaster declaration, even though the temblors were felt far across the island.
“Now everyone wants to be friends with Puerto Rico,” he said. “We’ll have to see who is really a friend, with their actions.”
Mr. Trump’s response to Hurricanes Irma and Maria in September 2017 proved to be a singular moment in his first year in office. Critics accused him of being slow and uncaring after he repeatedly attacked the island’s governor and the mayor of San Juan, its capital, saying that the territory’s finances and infrastructure were a wreck long before the hurricanes and threatening to cut off assistance.
When the president eventually visited in person, he tossed rolls of paper towels to those who had lost homes in an image that struck many there as out of touch.
Mr. Trump privately railed about the situation in Puerto Rico, eager to leave it to others to deal with. Elaine C. Duke, who was then acting secretary of homeland security, told The New York Times this summer that she was in a meeting with him when he broached the idea of “divesting” or “selling” the island. A year later, according to others who heard him, Mr. Trump returned to that topic, suggesting trading Puerto Rico to Denmark for Greenland.
He saw Puerto Rico through political eyes. After academics calculated that nearly 3,000 people died in the two hurricanes, Mr. Trump accused opponents of inventing a high death toll “to make me look as bad as possible.”
Even after Congress passed tens of billions of dollars in aid, Mr. Trump’s administration either slowed its release or put restrictions on its use over the objections of Puerto Rican officials and the president himself suggested such aid was unjustified.
“The people of Puerto Rico are wonderful but the inept politicians are trying to use the massive and ridiculously high amounts of hurricane/disaster funding to pay off other obligations,” Mr. Trump wrote on Twitter in October 2018. “The U.S. will NOT bail out long outstanding & unpaid obligations with hurricane relief money!” In August 2019, he wrote: “Congress approved Billions of Dollars last time, more than anyplace else has ever gotten, and it is sent to Crooked Pols. No good!”
His administration followed up on that sentiment, seeking to tie up aid for long periods of time and impose restrictions on its use. In January, the administration blocked spending on the same electric grid that Mr. Trump said on Friday was long overdue for restoration and at the same time it suspended the $15-an-hour minimum wage for federally funded relief aid.
Asked about his past criticism of Puerto Rico, the president said the difference was that he was now trying to build the island into a pharmaceutical manufacturing hub.
“Puerto Rico has been very corrupt in terms of its politicians,” the president told reporters at the White House. “You see that. They’re one after another. It’s been unbelievably corrupt.”
But he said there was no choice but to help restore their grid, which was “a disaster” even before the hurricanes.
“If we can build Puerto Rico back into a pharmaceutical manufacturing area, we’re going to designate it as such, I think it’ll be unbelievable for Puerto Rico, unbelievable for the people of Puerto Rico, and we can make it very successful,” Mr. Trump said.
Recovery aid has been very slow to come to Puerto Rico. The Federal Emergency Management Agency and Puerto Rican officials have disagreed on reconstruction costs, with FEMA accusing Puerto Rico of inflating estimates and Puerto Rico countering that FEMA was lowballing them. In one example, it took a year and a half to secure funding to rebuild the only hospital in the island municipality of Vieques.
Last year, Puerto Rico released a 10-year, $20 billion plan to bolster its fragile electrical grid, which has experienced recurrent outages since Hurricane Maria, a near-Category 5 storm, wrecked the island in September 2017. At least 2,975 people died. It took nearly a year to fully restore power and this year was battered by a flurry of earthquakes in the southwest of the island.
In June, the Puerto Rico Electric Power Authority, the bankrupt government-owned utility known as PREPA, which is some $9 billion in debt, had to sign a deal outsourcing the delivery of electricity to a consortium of 15 private operators for 15 years.
In Puerto Rico, Gov. Wanda Vázquez held a news briefing to underscore the unprecedented level of federal aid, which she said reflects confidence in her administration.
“I feel immense satisfaction,” she said. “To have achieved this historic grant for Puerto Rico makes me feel happy and fulfilled. I feel that the legacy that we leave the Puerto Rican people and future administrations will be the reconstruction of the country, beginning with the electrical grid and the education department.”
Ms. Vázquez, a Republican who assumed the governorship last year after the resignation of Gov. Ricardo A. Rosselló, hoped to run for the office in November. But last month, she lost the primary for the New Progressive Party, which supports statehood for Puerto Rico.
Puerto Rico, which effectively declared bankruptcy in 2016, has been mired in a 14-year recession. Public schools there have suffered mightily since even before the hurricane. Puerto Ricans have fled the island in search of jobs, and thousands of students have left the school system, forcing the shuttering of hundreds of schools.
Ms. Vázquez, a graduate of the public school system, said she dreams of having Puerto Rican children in the states return to the island, “so that Puerto Rico can keep moving forward.”
But Mr. Trump seemed to have his eye not just on Puerto Rico but on Florida, where hundreds of thousands of Puerto Ricans relocated after the 2017 hurricanes. Mr. Biden is leading by about two percentage points in Florida, essentially a statistical tie, and Democrats have expressed concern about his weakness among Hispanics in the state. His trip this week was meant to shore up his support; he released a plan to rebuild Puerto Rico before landing and criticized Mr. Trump’s response to the hurricanes while on the ground.
At Mr. Trump’s announcement of aid, the president brushed off a question about the connection to votes in Florida by attacking Mr. Biden. But hours later, the president’s campaign announced that he would make his own stop in Florida next Thursday.
Peter Baker reported from Washington, and Patricia Mazzei from Miami.
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