I read the story. The quote was treated as a run-on sentence in the deceitful headline.
First sentence: “They saved 16,000 people, many of them in Texas, for whatever reason that is," Trump said of the Coast Guard.†[period].
Next sentence: "People went out in their boats to watch the hurricane. That didn't work out too well."
First sentence was probably an exaggeration (though we don’t know what figures he was privy to and was using).
The second sentence was not subordinate to the first, it was a second thought, an anecdote. In Trump’s way of speaking the two weren’t connected.