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July 22, 2019, was a watershed moment in Puerto Rico’s history. On that day Puerto Ricans by the hundreds of thousands marched and demanded the resignation of Ricardo Rosselló Nevares, the colony’s inept and ethically bankrupt governor. On August 2 the pro-statehood governor became the first elected governor of Puerto Rico to resign his office. In the summer of 2019 Puerto Ricans repudiated the entrenched and selfperpetuating political class for its unfathomable venality, incompetence, and hubris. Puerto Rico’s political institutions were shaken, many of its leaders were discredited, and the legitimacy of the entire colonial regime rapidly eroded. Ironically, the Obama and Trump administrations may have emboldened the popular uprising. On June 30, 2016, President Obama signed into law the Puerto Rican Oversight, Management, and Economic Stability Act (PROMESA), a law designed to maximize the extraction of wealth from Puerto Rico to pay down the massive debt (estimated at US$74 billion) accumulated by successive Puerto Rican governments. PROMESA stripped the colonial government of its fiscal powers and created a financial control board (hereafter the junta) that is reviled by the populace for imposing crushing austerity that is impoverishing the archipelago. PROMESA was in effect a declaration that Puerto Rico’s political class could not be trusted to manage the colony in the interests of U.S. capital. The United States also had serious management issues of its own in dealing with the colony. The botched response of the Federal Emergency Management Administration (FEMA) to the disaster caused by Hurricane María revealed that the Trump administration was incapable of managing Puerto Rico’s recovery. FEMA was beset by the same unpreparedness, incompetence, and lack of planning that Trump insisted was uniquely Puerto Rican. It was lambasted for its failure to provide timely relief and for a callously bureaucratic emergency response to the devastation caused by the hurricane on September 20, 2017. An internal investigation in fact documents the agency’s numerous failings (Sullivan, 2018). FEMA ultimately bears much responsibility for nearly 5,000 deaths (Kishore et al., 2018). Through sheer braggadocio and outright fabrications, Trump triumphantly proclaimed that FEMA’s response was an “incredible success” (Gambino, 2018). In characteristic fashion, he tweeted that Puerto 906509LAPXXX10.1177/0094582X20906509Latin American PerspectivesCabán/Commentary research-article2020