WASHINGTON (AP) — President Donald Trump is concocting a story that the death toll from last year's Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico was invented by Democrats to make him look bad. Some fellow Republicans dissociated themselves from his false claims and acknowledged the veracity of an independent study that attributed nearly 3,000 deaths to the 2017 storm and its aftermath.

A look at his statements:

TRUMP: "3000 people did not die in the two hurricanes that hit Puerto Rico. When I left the Island, AFTER the storm had hit, they had anywhere from 6 to 18 deaths. As time went by it did not go up by...