Did Trump's golf weekend delay hurricane help for Puerto Rico?

President Trump
(Image credit: Pool/Getty Images)

The Trump administration is under fire for its response to Hurricane Maria, which decimated the U.S. territory of Puerto Rico on its destructive tear through the Caribbean earlier this month. "The Navy and Air Force could have been there Sunday," said Ret. Lt. Gen. Russel Honoré, who managed the military response to Hurricane Katrina, on Thursday. "Could have opened the port, could have opened the air field. Why the hell has it taken this long to do that?" Honoré asked, adding that someone should have gotten President Trump "off the damn golf course."

On the subject of the damn golf course, The Washington Post published a report Friday evening on the impact of Trump's golfing excursion last weekend, shortly after Maria made landfall, noting that the administration went nearly silent on the hurricane for four days while the president golfed at his club in New Jersey and tweeted about the NFL.

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Bonnie Kristian

Bonnie Kristian was a deputy editor and acting editor-in-chief of TheWeek.com. She is a columnist at Christianity Today and author of Untrustworthy: The Knowledge Crisis Breaking Our Brains, Polluting Our Politics, and Corrupting Christian Community (forthcoming 2022) and A Flexible Faith: Rethinking What It Means to Follow Jesus Today (2018). Her writing has also appeared at Time Magazine, CNN, USA Today, Newsweek, the Los Angeles Times, and The American Conservative, among other outlets.