For weeks, the governor’s request has gone unanswered.
Instead, Rosselló, a Democrat, has tried to communicate with the president publicly, saying in cable news interviews, official appearances and on Twitter that he fears Trump has been misled about Puerto Rico’s needs.
Trump, in a string of overnight and early-morning posts, once again cast Puerto Rican leaders this week as “incompetent and corrupt” for seeking additional federal aid. “The best thing that ever happened to Puerto Rico is President Donald J. Trump,” the president wrote on Twitter. “So many wonderful people, but with such bad Island leadership and with so much money wasted.”
Rosselló on Tuesday responded in a tweet of his own. “Mr. President, once again, we are not your adversaries, we are your citizens,” Rosselló wrote.
On Monday, the Senate blocked a disaster aid package for states across the country over disagreement about how much money to authorize for Puerto Rico. Trump claimed the island has received $91 billion, which is inaccurate; that’s how much damage Hurricane Maria caused the island, according to a federal government estimate.
The governor had bigger issues to deal with at home: The resignations of two power players on his Cabinet became public late Monday. Julia Keleher, the education secretary, and Héctor M. Pesquera, the public safety secretary, had been among the least popular members of Rosselló’s government. Their departures dominated the headlines in local media, which made little reference to what is widely seen here as yet another episode of presidential bluster.
That’s not to say Puerto Ricans necessarily disagree with Trump’s criticism of the commonwealth’s leaders, even if many locals dislike the president himself, or the disdainful way in which he sometimes refers to the island.
“We have a political caste that is opportunistic and extremely corrupt,” said Eduardo Lalo, a well-known local novelist, humanities professor and opinion columnist. “What the president says, of course it’s clumsy and tremendously vulgar, and he says it for reasons of his own that are not substantive. But it’s also objective.”
The truth is, he said, “Puerto Rico is a colony of the United States, and therefore its hands are completely tied.”
At a bakery in the comfortable San Juan neighborhood of Ocean Park on Tuesday, the morning crowd was hardly abuzz about Trump’s comments, though people had noticed them.
One patron, Miguel Rodríguez, 54, pulled out his cellphone to show how, moments earlier, a friend had posted on Facebook that she agreed with the president for the first time in praising Puerto Ricans but labeling their leaders as “corrupt.”
Rodríguez, the owner of a company that installs security systems, scrolled down to the comment he left under his friend’s post: “We do not lack resources, we have too many thieves.”
“The government wants to keep demanding money from the government of the United States,” Rodríguez said. “But much of that help doesn’t reach the people.”
Politically, Rosselló is in an unenviable position experienced by all of his predecessors: Puerto Rico cannot get funding even for its food stamp program without approval from Congress, but it has no congressional representation to make its case in Washington. (Rep. Jenniffer González-Colón, a Republican, has no vote in the House.) None of the prior governors, however, had to deal with the dire consequences of a massive hurricane in the middle of a government bankruptcy.
“Neither Trump nor any president of the United States nor any official in the United States has assumed the responsibility it has with Puerto Rico,” Lalo said. “The great tragedy of the Puerto Rican people is that for 120 years, it calls Washington, and no one picks up the phone.”
Rosselló, who is up for re-election next year, has faced intense criticism on the island for taking a smiling selfie with the president days after Hurricane Maria hit the island in September 2017 and then trying to work cooperatively with Trump even as the president was repeatedly deriding Puerto Rican leaders.
Last week, the governor amped up his language against Trump, appearing to refer to him as a “bully” in an interview with CNN.
“If the bully gets close, I’ll punch the bully in the mouth,” he said. “It would be a mistake to confuse courtesy with courage.”
He later characterized his comments as a “metaphor.”
Trump has refrained from going after Rosselló by name, preferring to focus his attention on Mayor Carmen Yulín Cruz, his political nemesis since her outspoken comments criticizing the Trump administration’s failure to provide swift and meaningful help in the weeks after the nearly Category 5 hurricane made landfall in September 2017.
After Trump called Cruz “crazed and incompetent” on Twitter on Monday, she fired back, calling him “unhinged.”
“He can huff & puff all he wants, but he cannot escape the death of 3,000 on his watch,” she wrote. “SHAME ON YOU!”
Cruz recently declared her candidacy for governor. She and several other candidates are hoping to unseat Rosselló in 2020. He is a supporter of Puerto Rican statehood; she is not.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.