-The President is still defending
his doctored math, insisting that he was right
about Hurricane Dorian hitting Alabama.
For more on this, it's time for "a closer look".
[ Cheers and applause ]
Now, we know Donald Trump is and has always been
a conspiracy theorist and pathological liar
who is completely detached from reality.
It's always been his brand.
It's just that back when he was a New York real-estate buffoon,
people didn't take it that seriously.
New Yorkers mostly ignored him
because that's what New Yorkers do with crazy people.
New Yorkers reacted to Trump the way you react to a guy
who gets on the subway with a lizard on his shoulder.
That was Trump.
Except in his case, he has two lizards.
In fact, Trump's entire origin story is basically
that of a crazy guy who, after years of being ignored,
finally heard, "Hey, cool lizard."
[ Laughter ]
His entire campaign for president started
as a desperate attempt to get people to take him seriously
as he himself admitted to his supporters
during a speech in 2016.
-A lot of people have laughed at me over the years.
Now they're not laughing so much, I'll tell you.
-That is something a villain would say in a superhero movie.
Don't believe me?
Because that line is almost verbatim
a line from the new Joker movie.
-A lot of people have laughed at me over the years.
Now they're not laughing so much, I'll tell you.
-Everyone laughed at me. Well, no one's laughing now.
[ Laughter ]
-Now, sometimes Trump lies for the obvious reasons --
like, you know, to cover up crimes.
Sometimes he makes up weird stuff for no apparent reason.
And then sometimes, there's just little bits of junk
floating around in his polluted brain that he belches up
during rambling speeches like the time he claimed
during a speech on trade that Canadians were smuggling shoes
back across the border to avoid paying tariffs on footwear,
tariffs that do not exist.
-There was a story two days ago in a major newspaper
talking about people living in Canada
coming into the United States and smuggling things
back into Canada because the tariffs are so massive.
The tariffs to get common items back into Canada are so high
that they have to smuggle them in.
They buy shoes, then they wear them.
The scuff them up.
They make them sound old or look old.
-They make the shoes sound old? What does that mean?
Do they complain about rap music?
Do they hit the roof of the apartment with a broom?
"Turn that racket down!
We got some boots trying to sleep!"
And, of course, it isn't just that Trump lies,
it's that he concocts elaborate fantasies
to justify those lies even when they're contradicted
by playing video evidence
that you can see and hear for yourself
like the time he accidentally called the CEO of Apple,
Tim Cook, "Tim Apple"
and then tripled down with a series of bizarre
and shifting excuses.
-The President is still playing clean-up
after the referred to Apple CEO Tim Cook as "Tim Apple."
-We appreciate it very much, Tim Apple.
-The coverage of Tim Apple
has apparently gotten under Trump's skin.
At Mar-a-Lago on Friday night with no cameras present,
Trump reportedly explained to a group of donors
what really happened.
Axios reports Trump told the donors that he actually said
"Tim Cook Apple," like, really fast,
and the "Cook" part of the sentence was soft
but all you heard from the fake news, he said, was "Tim Apple."
-A few days after that, Trump wrote this.
"At a recent roundtable meeting of business executives
and long after formally introducing Tim Cook of Apple,
I quickly referred to Tim plus Apple as 'Tim Apple'
as an easy way to save time and words."
-My favorite part of that tweet is when he writes out
"Tim plus Apple," like he's carving it into a tree.
[ Laughter ]
Trump has been at war with reality
virtually his entire adult life, and that war took
one of its most insane turns yet this week
when the President of the United States
spread disinformation about a hurricane
and then repeatedly went out of his way
to insist he was actually right.
You might remember this whole thing started
when Trump tweeted over the weekend
that Alabama would be hit by Hurricane Dorian,
and then 20 minutes later, the national weather service
had to tweet Alabama will not see any impacts of Dorian.
"We repeat -- No impacts from Hurricane Dorian
will be felt across Alabama."
That was 20 minutes later.
The National Weather Service
has to monitor the President's tweets
as closely as they monitor actual hurricanes,
which actually makes sense because when you think of it,
Donald Trump is the hurricane, except unlike regular Hurricanes
that eventually die down, everyday, Trump blows harder.
After he was corrected by his own government,
Trump doubled down, as you probably saw.
Yesterday, he seemed to alter a forecast on the storm's path
from last week with a circle added in Sharpie
to include Alabama.
My favorite thing about this
is that he didn't even try to blend it in.
He could have at least sent an intern to Kinko's
to print up a new chart.
"So, yeah, what are you trying to do here?"
"Uh, we want to fake a hurricane map
to retrofit a lie the President told to the American people."
"Okay. When do you need it by?"
Trump is even too lazy to lie convincingly,
and he used a Sharpie, which gives it away
because the only person in the world
who's famous for using Sharpies is Donald Trump.
It is a dead give away.
That's like turning to the Avengers and saying,
"All right, which one of you
shot me in the ass with an arrow?
Hawkeye? Was it you, Hawkeye?"
And then, later, Trump was asked about the altered map,
and he was so flummoxed, all he could do
was barf up a lengthy, incoherent word salad.
-You showed us the map earlier of the initial forecast.
It appeared to have been extended to include Alabama.
Can you explain how that came to be?
-No, I just know Alabama was in the original forecast.
They thought it would get it as a piece of it.
It was supposed to go -- Actually, we have a better map
than that, which is going to be presented
where we had many lines going directly, many models,
each line being a model,
and they were going directly through,
and then, in all cases, Alabama was hit.
They actually gave that a 95%-chance probability.
It turned out that that was not what happened.
It made the right turn up the coast.
Everyone's gonna be in great shape
because we're gonna take care of it, regardless.
Regardless. But the original path was through Florida.
That was probably three days --
I think that's probably three, four days old.
-I thought you wanted to save time and words!
[ Laughter ]
I'll make up for this.
I'll say Tim Apple, and that will buy all that time back.
Bill Microsoft -- That's five minutes right there.
Also, if it's three or four days old,
then why are you telling us this?
Why are you showing us a map of a hurricane
that's so out of date, you had to edit it with a Sharpie?
At his next briefing, he's just gonna hold up a map of Pangea.
"So, this is a little out of date.
Little out of date, but as you can see,
all the countries are crammed together, one land mass,
and, uh, the hurricane, it was gonna --
it was supposed to hit all these stegosauruses over here."
[ Laughter, applause ]
Then the reporter asked a natural follow-up question --
Did you use a sharpie to alter the map?
And Trump acted like he had no idea what happened.
-Is that map that you showed today --
looks like it was almost, like, a Sharpie.
-I don't know. I don't know. I don't know.
-It is so damning how he just keeps getting quieter.
He's like a kid who hit a baseball
through his neighbor's window.
"Who did this?"
"I don't know.
I-I don't know.
[ Quietly ] I don't know."
Also, what do you mean you don't know?
Are you claiming someone else defaced your map?
Like some prankster snuck in and sprayed graffiti on here?
"Yeah. They crept in here and drew a circle
and Sharpie on it, and then signed their names,
Tim plus Apple."
[ Laughter, applause ]
Then, last night, Trump still couldn't let it go
and tweeted what he claimed was a map of the original forecast
dated August 28th, which didn't prove anything anyway
because it was four days before his incorrect tweet on Sunday.
-On Wednesday, the President showed a map
trying again to prove his incorrect point.
But weather experts say the President was using
an out-of-date map.
There were much fresher forecasts.
-President Trump tweeted this.
It's called a spaghetti model.
It shows every possible path
the hurricane is forecasted to take.
-Those spaghetti models were from August 28th.
By the time the President tweeted Alabama at 10:51 a.m.
on Sunday, the forecast track had moved well east.
-These were all the computer models, the spaghettis.
-That's right. He tweeted a map
of what's known as the spaghetti models.
Of course, Trump probably thought
it was a map that tells you where you can find spaghetti.
"It's very helpful.
I didn't even know you could get spaghetti in Alabama, but..."
So, the President has already been corrected
by his own government, altered an official Hurricane forecast
with a Sharpie, rambled on about it at a press conference,
and then tweeted about it,
and yet, somehow, this fever dream has not come to an end
because Trump woke up this morning, and, again,
railed off another deranged tweet storm about it.
Trump tweeted in the early days of the hurricane,
when it was predicted that Dorian would go
through Miami or West Palm Beach,
certain models strongly suggested that Alabama
and Georgia would be hit.
And then Hurricane Dorian took a different path
up along the east coast.
Why did you put that in parenthesis?
That's the only part of the tweet that's correct.
At this rate, Trump's gonna start adding tiny footnotes
to his tweets with the correct information at the bottom.
"I just nuked something... a Hot Pocket in the microwave."
[ Laughter, cheers and applause ]
This whole thing perfectly captures the constant exhausting
bewilderment of living through the Trump era.
There's a very real humanitarian crisis unfolding in the Bahamas
and a dangerous Hurricane is threatening the mainland U.S.,
and, meanwhile, the President is obsessing over a map he doctored
to defend an embarrassing mistake
that he is now repeatedly lying about.
Almost nothing that comes out of his mouth is true.
In fact, at any time he speaks, the odds that he's lying are...
-A 95%-chance probability.
-This has been "A Closer Look."