Boston Red Sox manager Alex Cora, a native of Puerto Rico, called President Donald Trump’s comments disputing the island’s death toll from Hurricane Maria “disrespectful.”
His comments came Thursday during an interview with NBC Sports Boston.
“You know, 3,000, six, 18,” he said. “I don’t know. We will never know how many, how many we lost,” he said. I hate that people make it a political issue. This is about human beings.
“But the aftereffects, people don’t talk about that. And when you don’t have food, you don’t have water, no communication, no medicine, then this happened. “
Cora said he had seen Trump’s tweets about the estimated number of people killed in the 2017 storm.
“To be tweeting about 3,000 people and be efficient, it’s actually disrespectful for my country. We see it that way. And like I said, hey man, thank you for helping us. He went down there, he did what he did. I hate talking about politics and all that, but I think this is more than politics.”
Trump on Thursday denied Puerto Rico’s official death toll and claimed that Democrats inflated the figures. According to the government of Puerto Rico, an estimated 2,975 people died as a result of Maria.