Trump said on Tuesday that officials should be \u201cproud\u201d that Hurricane Maria wasn\u2019t \u201ca real catastrophe like Katrina,\u201d according to BBC.<\/b>
\nPresident Donald Trump’s much-anticipated visit to Puerto Rico on Tuesday became easy fodder for memes and internet jokes.
The memes captured the president tossing paper towels to people at a relief event like he was shooting a basketball.
Here\u2019s video of the moment.
Trump\u2019s election campaign and presidency have been filled with meme-worthy moments that his campaign used to rally his base and rile opponents. Sometimes people around him \u2014 like Mitt Romney and Kellyanne Conway \u2014 suffered the brunt of internet jokes.
And the trend continued Tuesday, with Trump\u2019s paper-towel moment winning over the internet with jokes and memes.
However, not everyone was happy with the president’s first appearance in the U. S. territory after Hurricane Maria pummeled the island, leaving millions of people without electricity and depleted resources. MSNBC reporter Joy Reid tweeted that San Juan Mayor Carmen Yulin Cruz told her that Trump insulted Puerto Rico with the paper towel gaffe.
Cruz, who exchanged a war of words with Trump over the weekend about the federal response to help the island recover, called Trump the \u201cmiscommunicator-in-chief\u201d when she spoke to MSNBC on Tuesday.
\u201cThis terrible and abominable view of him throwing paper towels and throwing provisions at people, it does not embody the spirit of the American nation,\u201d Cruz told MSNBC . \u201cThat is not the land of the free and the home of the brave, that beacon of democracy that people have learned to look up to across the world.\u201d
Before the paper towel moment, Trump said officials should be \u201cproud\u201d that Hurricane Maria wasn\u2019t \u201ca real catastrophe like Katrina,\u201d according to BBC.
«Every death is a horror,» Trump said, «but if you look at a real catastrophe like Katrina, and you look at the tremendous \u2014 hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of people that died, and you look at what happened here, with really a storm that was just totally overpowering, nobody’s ever seen anything like this.»
Trump said Puerto Rico has thrown the U. S. budget \u201cout of whack,\u201d but promised to help provide aid to the country. The White House later announced it would spend $29 billion on recovery efforts in Texas, Florida and, yes, Puerto Rico.<\/p>\n

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