Welcome to Off Message. I'm Isaac DeBair. Today's guest, Puerto Rico Congresswoman Jennifer Gonzalez.

Congresswoman is the technical term. She doesn't actually have a vote in Congress, so she's also known as the resident commissioner.

But she is the one that Puerto Rican voters sent to Washington, starting in January, it's her first term, to represent them.

It's easy to not think about what's going on in Puerto Rico.

It can seem like it's far away, even though it's not.

There certainly isn't a lot of television coverage about what's happening there anymore,

though the situation in some

places is actually growing more desperate. Consider what state of mind you have to be in to go to a

super fun site looking for drinking water. It's nuts. Meanwhile, I have President Trump talking about what's going on there and saying that the island

was in bad shape before the hurricanes and now it's in worse shape.

All of this comes together in Gonzales' mind and in her work, and I was really glad to get

a chance to catch up with her, talk about how it factors in for her

on both a policy level and a personal level because this is still going on and we're going to

keep talking about it. You'll hear her tear up talking about what this experience has been,

the kind of ad hoc community living that's taken root since Hurricane Maria hit.

There's a line that struck me from what she said when Bridget and I sat down with her in her office on Capitol Hill.

It said, your life is like stopping without knowing what is going to happen next.

But the word she kept using in our conversation about the president is shocking.

She was talking about the tweets and the comments beating up on Puerto Rico,

blaming the debt crisis and the poor infrastructure for the situation that's happened since.

It's really a striking contrast, especially when she talked about being on Air Force One with President Trump on his way to San Juan two weeks ago.

And having what she said was a really engaged conversation with him, that he was on top of it,

...