Lou Dobbs defends Trump on Hurricane Maria death toll. Here’s why he questions the new numbers…

President Donald Trump found some staunch support of his remarks about the hurricane death toll in Puerto Rico even as critics slammed him.

Fox Business’ Lou Dobbs came to the defense of the president, unloading in a fiery monologue on Thursday on those “who’ve blindly accepted an amazing tortured inflation of the death toll.”

 

Trump drew backlash Thursday when he tweeted that the revised death count in Puerto Rico as a result of last year’s Hurricane Maria was inflated for political reasons.

Trump’s remarks sparked outrage from his opponents but also on the Republican side of the aisle as Florida Gov. Rick Scott openly said he disagreed with the president.

“Only President Trump has had the guts to call out the Dems and national left wing media types, who’ve blindly accepted an amazing tortured inflation of the death toll, almost 50 times higher than the original count, and with scant evidence to support any of it,” Dobbs said on Fox Business Network’s “Lou Dobbs Tonight” Thursday.

“How does that count go from dozens in the days after the storm to almost 3,000 nearly a year later?” Dobbs asked. “It involves as many academicians as humanly possible in the effort, and then you watch the entire exercise become a farce.”

Dobbs also took to Twitter, blasting the attempt “to discredit his administration.”

Trump later retweeted Dobbs.

The White House issued a statement on Thursday addressing the president’s remarks.

“As the President said, every death from Hurricane Maria is a horror,” read the statement by Deputy White House Press Secretary Hogan Gidley.

“Before, during and after the two massive hurricanes, the President directed the entire Administration to provide an unprecedented support to Puerto Rico,” the statement continued. “President Trump was responding to the liberal media and the San Juan Mayor who sadly have tried to exploit the devastation by pushing out a constant stream of misinformation and false accusations.”

Dobbs noted a study from George Washington University’s Milken Institute, the source of the 3,000 number in Puerto Rico, which estimated the number of “excess deaths” due to Hurricane Maria, instead of normal population fluctuations.

“The finding wasn’t a result of a death toll count, a body count, nor a study of death certificates, but a public health study that subtracted the number of people who theoretically should have died over the same period from the number of people who were reported dead over that period,” Dobbs said.

“After the report came out, Puerto Rico’s Democratic governor officially revised the death toll from 65 to the new estimate,” he said.

Dobbs concluded his monologue Thursday doubling down on his support of Trump and backing his claims about the death toll numbers being inflated.

“The numbers were inflated and the president was right to call out the organizations who threw out science, statistics and evidence to discredit the Trump administration,” Dobbs said.

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