administrator criswell and secretary mayorkas had our application all the way to the white house with approvals waiting for the signed document. that s how quick this thing moved. thank you gracia and please update us on fema. governor, director dawson. thank you. yesterday meant so much to the secretary, to the administrator, to really see and as they said the pictures didn t do anything what we saw on the ground. such an impact and as director dawson said our hearts and prayers and thoughts go to the families. for the families who lost loved ones, for the families who suffered such incredible damages from what we saw. and last night as you heard, the president did declare a major declaration. this included eight counties and i ll read those counties off.
going back to maria here, this is part of what the gao s report on fema s response of maria laid out. this is the government s own report on the government s response. the general accounting office here. quote staff shortages and lack of trained personnel with program expertise led to complications. many reservists were not physically fit to handle conditions on the island. the report s author told bloomberg, quote, they were not prepared to respond to an event like that. like the intelligence reports on russian interference, pretty definitive yet the president seems to have his own facts when it comes to maria. why? he sure does. another rule of of president trump that he s articulated to people is basically to sort of repeat your own version of reality until you can make it true and the truth is he is correct of there s a lot of challenges faced in combatting a
president s high priority and something he wanted to do himself. we expect to get more and more specifics as the day unfolds. craig? kelly o donnell there for us from the white house, thank you. tremendously big. as the washington post puts it, the president reaches for super latives in the face of calamity. i have the reporter that wrote the piece about the response to this looming storm standing by. also, are we ready? are we really ready? fema laying out the plan to deal with florence that the experts call a storm of a lifetime. we ll keep an eye on the carolina coast. a live look at nags head, north carolina. right there. we re also going to go to south carolina, as well. south carolina bracing for this storm. i ll talk to a former governor coming up in a few minutes. this is msnbc. george woke up in pain.
people took offense to that scene, robert. you know, alex, i don t even know where to begin. first of all, just the tone of that e-mail in terms of the crowds and the roears and the cheers, that s number one. number two, we re talking about the president of the united states defending himself against throwing towels out like he s some king and throwing out money to the paupers. let s just go back to normalcy. you would think he d talk about how he saw the devastation, how he s doubling down on fema, how he s working with the governor and talking about rebuilding puerto rico. you would think he would talk about how we get more resources into that island and he would also remind every single american that these are our fellow americans and we have to do everything that we can to help them. here we are responding to paper towels. yeah. go figure. so adrienne is it possible that he was just feeding off the
going to die. this is not the time for that. and if the president actually cared about it, he would step on the golf course that he is going to be on this weekend and actually fully put pressure down on fema, department of homeland security, as well as dod to make sure that all the assets are necessary and on the island to stabilize the island. this is getting bad. people are running out of insulin. there s no running water on many parts of the island. there are still isolated villages. this is an island that is only two hours away from most of the mainland united states. these are 3.5 million american citizens that we have abandoned. we should be ashamed of ourselves. this is absolutely not acceptable. it is pretty staggering that you re looking at nine days after a storm, which you had days of lead time to realize could be catastrophic. you re finally getting a sat phone to a mayor. i mean it sort of defies belief here. when you hear i had better go on. i had better suppo