Egotistical fucker...

Trump says San Juan mayor has 'come back a long way'

By LOUIS NELSON

President Donald Trump said as he departed for hurricane-ravaged Puerto Rico on Tuesday morning that the mayor of San Juan, who he strongly criticized over the weekend, has “come back a long way.”

San Juan Mayor Carmen Yulín Cruz was outspoken last week in her pleas for more support from the federal government, criticizing the rosy recovery picture painted by acting Secretary of Homeland Security Elaine Duke and appealing directly to the president in an interview on CNN.

Although she expressed gratitude for Trump’s help and did not attack him directly, her words were enough to prompt the president into a Twitter spree in which he said the mayor had shown “such poor leadership ability.” At the outset of his Tuesday morning trip to the island, Trump suggested Cruz had begun to come around.

“Well, I think she's come back a long way. And you know, I think it's now acknowledged what a great job we've done and people are looking at that,” the president told reporters before boarding Marine One on the White House’s south lawn. “whether it's her or anybody else, they're all starting to say it. I appreciate very much the governor and his comments. He has said we have done an incredible job, and that's the truth.”

Trump did not refer to any specific comments from Cruz that indicated she had “come back” from her criticism of the federal response.

It was a significantly warmer tone toward the mayor than the president expressed over the weekend, when he wrote online that Cruz “who was very complimentary only a few days ago, has now been told by the Democrats that you must be nasty to Trump” and that she and other Puerto Rican leaders “want everything to be done for them when it should be a community effort.”

The president on Tuesday praised the work of first responders and federal teams from FEMA and the military who have worked to aid Puerto Rico, but he doubled down on a complaint he issued online over the weekend, that Cruz and other Puerto Rican officials “are not able to get their workers to help.”

“Now the roads are cleared. Communication’s starting to come back. We need their truck drivers,” Trump said. “Their drivers have to start driving trucks. We have to do that. So at a local level, they have to give us more help.”