On the fifth anniversary of Hurricane Maria, a show of extraordinary tenderness and political bite shines a light on a man-made and natural disaster.
For many North Americans, the lasting news image of Hurricane Maria, the monster storm that laid waste to Puerto Rico in 2017, wasn’t of the storm itself, but of a political photo-op that followed, when former President Donald J. Trump visited more than two weeks after the disaster had left the island desperately short on power, fresh water and food.
Trump was escorted to an emergency distribution center where, in a kind of cartoon version of imperial largess, he began lobbing rolls of paper towels into a crowd. The gesture read to some as a rebuke: “Clean up your mess.” (Trump had earlier confided to Twitter that Puerto Ricans “want everything to be done for them.”) Turning his back on the mild scramble that ensued, he purred to reporters: “There’s a lot of love in this room, a lot of love.”
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