THE LOST COLONY
A BIG STORM CAN RAKE UP A LOT.
Ten days after Hurricane Maria roared across Puerto Rico, joggers circling the capital’s Condado lagoon were delighted by the sight of manatees, the gentle herbivores that sailors once mistook for mermaids. It’s not a routine sight in San Juan, and it was a rare uplifting one in a catalog of all the storm had laid bare: nearly every branch of every tree, with the interiors of homes opened like dollhouses—and, not least, the lopsided dynamic between Washington and the U.S. territory that might be best understood as America’s Last Colony.
Maria could be the most destructive Atlantic storm on record. Research by the Climate Impact Lab suggests that no larger area has been hit so comprehensively anywhere in the world in the past 60 years. Yet the storm somehow managed to reinforce one thing: the historically paternalistic relationship between mainland and island. The inequity became more pronounced with the passing of each muggy day in the storm’s aftermath. The federal government’s response was markedly slower and less attentive to Puerto Rico after Maria than to Texas after Harvey and Florida after Irma. And when the devastation finally came home to the White House, almost a week after Maria’s Sept. 20 landfall, what President Trump most conspicuously doled out to the victims was tart advice followed by angry remonstration.
To the victims of Harvey, Trump contributed $1 million from his personal
