Donald Trump has rejected the official conclusion that nearly 3,000 people died in Puerto Rico from last year’s Hurricane Maria.

The US president argued without evidence that the number was wrong and called it a plot by Democrats to make him “look as bad as possible”.

As Hurricane Florence approached the Carolinas, the president picked a fresh fight over the administration’s response to the Category 4 storm that smashed into the US territory last September.

Mr Trump visited the island in early October to assess the situation amid widespread criticism over the recovery efforts.

He said: “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 much. Then, a long time later, they started to report really large numbers, like 3000…”

He added: “This was done by the Democrats in order to make me look as bad as possible when I was successfully raising Billions of Dollars to help rebuild Puerto Rico.”

Puerto Rico’s governor last month raised Maria’s official death toll from 64 to 2,975 after an independent study found that the number of people who succumbed in the sweltering aftermath had been severely under-counted.

Previous reports from the Puerto Rican government said the number was closer to 1,400.

Mr Trump’s comments drew swift criticism from elected officials and residents of the island, where blackouts remain common, 60,000 homes still have makeshift roofs and 13% of municipalities lack stable phone or internet service.

Governor Ricardo Rossello said in a Facebook post in Spanish, “the victims of Puerto Rico, and the people of Puerto Rico in general, do not deserve to be questioned about their pain”.

Mr Rossello said he left the analysis of the deaths in the hands of experts and accepted their estimate as the official death toll. “I trust that this process was carried out properly,” he said.

San Juan Mayor Carmen Yulin Cruz, a Democrat who has sparred with Mr Trump, tweeted that “Trump is so vain he thinks this is about him. NO IT IS NOT.”

Luis Gutierrez, whose parents were Puerto Rican immigrants, spoke on the House floor in front of a printout of the Puerto Rican flag, saying Mr Trump is “delusional” and incapable of “empathy or basic human decency”.

Mr Trump began to focus on Hurricane Florence earlier this week, calling for an Oval Office briefing to warn about the threat.

But as the hurricane began to dominate news coverage, the administration’s efforts after Hurricane Maria came under new scrutiny and began to infuriate Mr Trump, according to two Republican advisers.

When a reporter asked Mr Trump about Maria in the Oval Office, he swiftly unleashed a defence of his response to the hurricane.

Mr Trump told confidants that the media was underplaying the challenging circumstances in Puerto Rico and trying to exploit the storm to attack him. He told one adviser that he felt that the media “would stop at nothing” to undermine him and blamed local authorities for their inept response.

The estimate of nearly 3,000 dead in the six months after Maria devastated Puerto Rico and knocked out the entire electricity grid was made by researchers with the Milken Institute School of Public Health at George Washington University.

The study said the original estimates were so low because doctors on the island had not been trained to properly classify deaths after a natural disaster.