Rightwing provocateur Clay Travis continues the rightwing playbook of trying to compare President Joe Biden’s response to the wildfires on Maui, where about 1,000 are unaccounted for, versus hurricanes hitting New Orleans and Puerto Rico, when more than 3,000 people died in each.  Lying about the causes for pushback on how GW Bush and Trump handled deadly hurricanes hitting US territory, Travis glosses over the utter ineptitude of the two Republicans.

Harris, if you contemplate and just think about the way George W. Bush was treated in the aftermath of Katrina, the way that Donald Trump was treated by the media in the aftermath of the hurricane when he went to Puerto Rico. [Harris Faulkner strangely interject, “And both of those were disasters!”] Our federal government actually responded far better to both of those events than we have to Maui.  Harris, I heard you reading earlier and this remains the fact:  over 800 people are still missing.  It’s possible that a thousand people, nearly, lost their lives in this event and one of the reasons we can’t find any trace is because this wildfire was so destructive.

The poor public reactions to Bush during Katrina and Trump during Maria was due to their responses:  Bush returned to Washington, DC from a fundraiser in Texas and literally flew over the Katrina devastation in Air Force One, releasing tone-deaf photos of him looking out a window of the jet.  Trump famously visited Puerto Rico for a few hours after Maria devastated the island, during which he threw paper towels into the crowd and boasted about how few people died, denying the actual death toll that reach more than 3,000.

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