President Donald Trump visited storm-ravaged Puerto Rico on Tuesday, highlighting its relatively low death toll compared with “a real catastrophe like Katrina” as he opened a tour of the island’s devastation.

Trump pledged an all-out effort to help the island but added: “Now I hate to tell you, Puerto Rico, but you’ve thrown our budget a little out of whack because we’ve spent a lot of money on Puerto Rico. And that’s fine. We’ve saved a lot of lives.”

He said his visit was “not about me” but then praised local officials for offering kind words about the recovery effort and invited one to repeat the “nice things” she’d said earlier. Trump also singled out Gov. Ricardo Rossello for “giving us the highest praise.”

“Every death is a horror,” he said, “but if you look at a real catastrophe like Katrina and you look at the tremendous, hundreds of and hundreds and hundreds of people that died, and you look at what happened here ... nobody’s ever seen anything like this.”

Air Force One brought the president, first lady Melania Trump and aides to Puerto Rico late this morning. They were expected to spend more than five hours on the ground, meeting first responders, local officials and some of millions of people whose lives have been upended by a hurricane that, in the president's words, left the island U.S. territory “flattened.”

The plane descended over a landscape marked by mangled palm trees, metal debris strewn near homes and patches of stripped trees, yet with less devastation evident than farther from San Juan.

The president, who in recent days took to Twitter to exchange barbs with San Juan Mayor Carmen Yulín Cruz about hurricane response timeliness, repeated his praise of the federal recovery operation on Monday.

On Sept. 16, Hurricane Maria swept across Puerto Rico with sustained winds of 64 mph and gusts that reached 118 mph. Heavy rainfall occurred throughout the territory as the strongest storm to hit the island since 1928 roared across the island.  

Puerto Rico's 3.4 million residents have mostly been in the dark since the storm and have struggled with getting water, fuel, and supplies throughout the island in the storm's aftermath. 

Debris still litters the scene. 

"We are going to be seeing all of the first responders, the military, FEMA, and frankly, most importantly, we are going to be seeing the people of Puerto Rico," Trump said in the Oval Office ahead of talks with the Thai prime minister. "It's been amazing what's been done in a very short period of time on Puerto Rico. There's never been a piece of land that we've known that was so devastated."

Trump administration officials suggested Cruz had refused invitations to participate in FEMA briefings, opting instead to appear on television. The mayor, in turn, insisted that she would not be distracted by "small comments, by politics, by petty issues."

The White House said Monday that Trump will visit Las Vegas on Wednesday in the aftermath of the nation's deadliest mass shooting. 

Information from CNN and the Associated Press was used in this report.