It's Trump's fault now that the original death tolls by the Puerto Rican government were about 16, then upped to 45, then later upped to a few hundred? And, he has to accept a study by a non-governmental entity that says 3,000?
He should stop it with the tweets, because they always give his opposition opportunities. And, he doesn't know how many people died, so he shouldn't declare that he knows 3,000 didn't die. What he should do is calmly issue a statement that says that according to government sources at or near the time of the events, the death toll was reported to him by Puerto Rican authorities to be in the 10s or dozens, and that it took many many months for other numbers to be reported.
About a month ago, the number was about 1400 from other sources.
Now it's 3000, and it's a complete outrage to deny it?
Many news reports latched on to the number 4,645 in a new Harvard University study about the death toll in Puerto Rico from Hurricane Maria — more than 70 times above the government’s official count.
https://www.politifact.com/truth-o-mete ... ane-maria/
UPDATE Sept. 13, 2018: Since this story posted, another study attempting to approximate the death toll was commissioned by the government in Puerto Rico and published by the George Washington University Milken Institute School of Public Health. The study released in August 2018 analyzed death certificates and other mortality data and found an estimated 2,975 excess deaths between September 2017 through the end of February 2018. The team compared the total number of deaths during that time to the expected number based on historical patterns and found that the number was 22 percent higher than would have been expected.
https://www.politifact.com/truth-o-mete ... ane-maria/
Trump is correct in that this is a model, not a death count. It's an estimate, based on the data put in.
Trump shouldn't have bothered commenting on it. This is new information, and nobody can go back in time and in hindsight correct what was published when Maria hit, which was from 16 to 65 deaths. People speculated it should be more, and some said it would be a few hundred. The Harvard study above said it was 95% confidence of somewhere above 738, with no number being more likely than any other in the range predicted.
So, it's not wrong to view the numbers skeptically, but it is wrong to simply declare that 3,000 people did not die. What he should have said was that at the time of the events the information he was given from Puerto Rican authorities was in the range of 16 to 65, and that's the actionable information anyone had at the time.
He's not wrong, though, that the Democrats salivate over blaming Republicans for hurricane response. Just look back at hurricane Katrina and how they manufactured Bush being responsible for that. Trump shouldn't have made the accusation, but let's not be naive and exempt the Democrats (and others) from at least a POSSIBLE motive to embellish.
“When I was in college, I took a terrorism class. ... The thing that was interesting in the class was every time the professor said ‘Al Qaeda’ his shoulders went up, But you know, it is that you don’t say ‘America’ with an intensity, you don’t say ‘England’ with the intensity. You don’t say ‘the army’ with the intensity,” she continued. “... But you say these names [Al Qaeda] because you want that word to carry weight. You want it to be something.” - Ilhan Omar
Whadda they want, more paper towels thrown at them? That's it, isn't it? They want more free handouts! 
