But with another hurricane bearing down on North Carolina Thursday morning, President Donald Trump took to Twitter to argue, without evidence, that “3,000 people did not die” and that the numbers were made up by his political opponents to make him look bad. As Hurricane Florence approached the Carolinas, Trump tweeted Thursday a fresh fight over the administration’s response in Puerto Rico, tweeting: “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. The estimate of nearly 3,000 dead in the six months after Maria devastated the island in September 2017 and knocked out the entire electrical grid was made by researchers with the Milken Institute School of Public Health at George Washington University. Trump has also argued that the government’s response to Hurricane Maria an “unsung success” and arguing it was unappreciated because Puerto Rico is “an inaccessible island with very poor electricity and a totally incompetent Mayor of San Juan.”

However, an internal report from the Federal Emergency Management Agency released in July found that the agency failed to prepare properly for Maria or provide enough supplies to the island. A woman tries to walks out from her house after the area was hit by Hurricane Maria in Salinas, Puerto Rico on September 21, 2017.
U.S. President Donald Trump denies that 3,000 people died in the 2017 hurricane, advancing a number of "6 to 18 deaths", and further makes the false assertion that the Democrats inflated the former number.