San Juan Mayor Carmen Yulín Cruz wore a T-shirt adorned with the word “nasty” during a TV interview on Wednesday, October 4, after President Donald Trump repeatedly used the term to describe her.
“When it bothers somebody that you’re asking for drinking water, medicine for the sick and food for the hungry, that person has much deeper problems than what we can discuss in an interview,” the 54-year-old politician told Jorge Ramos on Univision’s Al Punto. “What is really nasty is that anyone would turn their back on the Puerto Rican people.”
“Nasty woman” has become somewhat of a battle cry for women who oppose Trump, 71, ever since he used the term to describe Democratic rival Hillary Clinton during the 2016 presidential election. He repeated the phrase during an interview on Fox News’ Hannity on Tuesday, October 3, when he said that Cruz was “very nice at the very beginning” before she “went a little bit on the nasty side.”
The former Celebrity Apprentice host and the mayor have been feuding since last week when she criticized the Trump administration’s response to Hurricane Maria’s devastation in Puerto Rico. They shook hands at the airport during Trump’s brief visit to the island on Tuesday, but he did not call on Cruz for remarks as he met with other federal and local officials.
“I said to the president is that this is about saving lives. This is not about politics,” Cruz said on Al Punto. “There are people who do everything for a calculative political motive. My only motive is a human motive. … We’re talking about life or death.”
Cruz also slammed the real estate mogul for comparing the death toll in Puerto Rico to that of New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina in 2005. “He kind of minimized our suffering here by saying that Katrina was a real disaster, sort of implying that this was not a real disaster because not many people have died here,” she said. “Well, you know, they’re dying. They don’t have medical resources.”
