“You have the mayor of San Juan, who’s incompetent,” Trump told Geraldo Rivera for the debut show of “Geraldo in Cleveland” on WTAM radio. “She should never be there. She’s just doesn’t know what she’s doing, she’s a totally incompetent person. You have, as you know, locally they did a very, very poor job. The electric was broken before the storms that got hit by two storms, not one."

He said critics blamed him for a situation that was already dysfunctional before the storm. “It was a total mess, it was corrupt — couldn’t be worse,” he said. “The storms hit and they said: ‘Oh, let’s blame Trump for the electric, let’s have Trump, let’s have Trump fix the electric plant, which takes a long time to rebuild it, which is a big deal. Let’s blame Trump for everything.'”

Trump first lashed out at Cruz shortly after the hurricane last September, accusing her of “poor leadership” after she criticized the federal response. More recently, he has sought to portray his handling of the disaster as “an incredible, unsung success” despite failures in food and water distribution, and electric outages that lasted nearly a year.

“If he thinks the death of 3,000 people is a success, God help us all,” Cruz had responded on Twitter.

In the interview taped Sunday and broadcast Monday, Rivera asked Trump if he would support statehood for Puerto Rico as a way to fix its inherent structural problems. The president replied with an “absolute no,” citing Cruz as a reason.

“With the mayor of San Juan as bad as she is and as incompetent as she is, Puerto Rico shouldn’t be talking about statehood until they get some people that really know what they’re doing,” he said.

Puerto Rico’s governor, Ricardo A. Rosselló, responded sharply later in the day. “The president said he is not in favor of statehood for the people of Puerto Rico based on a personal feud with a local mayor,” Rosselló said in a statement. “This is an insensitive, disrespectful comment to over 3 million Americans who live in the U.S. territory of Puerto Rico.”

But Trump insisted that he had affection for the people of the island. “I love Puerto Rican people,” he told Rivera. “I love you. You’re half Puerto Rico. I love you.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

Peter Baker and Eileen Sullivan © 2018 The New York Times