Shortly after returning to Washington from Puerto Rico where he went to access level of Hurricane damage and offer support, President granted an interview with Fox News, where he emphasised the need to wipe out the island’s debt in order to ensure a restoration of the city of about 3.5million people.

Trump said during the interview: “They owe a lot of money to your friends on Wall Street and we’re going to have to wipe that out. You’re going to say goodbye to that, I don’t know if it’s Goldman Sachs, but whoever it is you can wave goodbye to that”.

Puerto Rico has been left in an extreme state of damage following the category 4 Hurricane Maria which battered the island after making landfall two weeks ago.

The rainfall destroyed Puerto Rico’s entire infrastructure system, leaving 95 percent of the citizens without power and several others without clean water.

Its death toll has equally jumped to 34 from the initial record of 16.

Unlike Texas and Florida which also suffered from deadly Hurricanes recently, Puerto Rico is finding it hard to provide adequate relief supplies owing to its government’s struggle with a crumbling economy submerged in billions of dollars of public debt.

Current data reveals that the island is enmeshed in nearly $70 billion debt, an unemployment rate 2.5 times the U.S. average, a 45 percent poverty rate, a less functioning pension systems and a crippling Medicaid insurance program for the poor.

Puerto Rico’s shrinking job base continues to shrink and has pushed a lot of its citizens to seek survival on the mainland where the chances of nabbing a job is high.

Trump during his visit on Tuesday said that responding to the hurricane’s devastation had thrown the federal budget “out of whack,” but however praised officials and first responders for preventing the storm from becoming a “real catastrophe” like Hurricane Katrina.

The island filed for a form of bankruptcy in May, but, Moody’s Investors Service in a note published last week, said widespread damage has reduced the economic capacity of the island to pay, and has defeated any assumptions previously made in the bankruptcy proceeding.

Franklin Advisers and OppenheimerFunds held a combined $10.3 billion in Puerto Rican debt as of July, and are among the island’s largest creditors, including New York-based hedge fund Blue Mountain Capital, which has invested in Puerto Rican debt for several years, and Global fund manager Franklin Templeton, which said as of the end of August it holds Puerto Rican debt through several of its mutual funds.