The president continues to defend a tweet that he sent out on Sunday morning in which
he said Alabama could possibly get some damage from Dorian.
The president tweeting, “Alabama was going to be hit or grazes, and then Dorian took
a different path (up along the East Coast).
The Fake News knows this very well.
That’s why they’re the Fake News!”
Bit of a controversy has erupted over this because at his hurricane briefing yesterday,
the president held up a graphic of a 5-day warning cone from last Friday the 30th which
appeared to have been modified with a sharpie to extend the bubble out there as you can
see to include the Florida panhandle and parts of southern Alabama.
The president was asked how that line got there yesterday afternoon.
Listen here.
But the original path was through Florida, but was probably three days—I think that’s
probably 3, 4 days old.
The original path that most people thought it was going to be taking as you know was
right through Florida where, on the right would’ve been Georgia, Alabama, etc.
And that map that you showed us today – it looked almost like a sharpie—
I don’t know.
The president saying he didn’t know how that line get there.
The president also tweeted out a graphic of hurricane model plots collected by the South
Florida Water Management District to prove that Alabama was at risk.
And some of those tracks did come very close to the eastern part of Alabama.
But those spaghetti models were from Thursday, August 28.
By the time the president tweeted about Alabama at 10:51am on Sunday, the forecast track had
moved well east.
This is the 8 o’clock in the morning warning on Sunday the 1st and you can see that they’re
indicating that Dorian would stay well off-shore and well away from Alabama.
We are now on day 5 of the president of the United States, a full-grown adult man, refusing
to simply admit he made a mistake and instead digging in his heels on the claim that hurricane
Dorian was going to strike Alabama.
To be clear, all of this is happening WHILE the hurricane has all but destroyed islands
in the Bahamas and is decimating the Carolinas with flooding, strong winds and even tornadoes.
But I’m sure Americans whose lives are actually in danger can find solace in the fact that
the guy who can allocate emergency federal funding is digging through old forecasting
models to prove his point.
The entire issue here is that on Sunday, Trump tweeted “In addition to Florida - South
Carolina, North Carolina, Georgia, and Alabama, will most likely be hit (much) harder than
anticipated.
Looking like one of the largest hurricanes ever.”
Moments later, the National Weather Service tweeted, “Alabama will NOT see any impacts
from Dorian.
We repeat, no impacts from Hurricane Dorian will be felt across Alabama.
The system will remain too far east.”
But instead of just accepting the mistake and moving on, Trump has instead opted to
pretend that he was right by tweeting out models of the hurricane’s path… from three
days before his original tweet.
His models clearly show the date as Thursday, August 29, whereas on Sunday, the updated
models show Dorian’s path nowhere near Alabama, but instead making a hard right up the east
coast.
He even went so far as to show a model of the hurricane with its path altered with a
sharpie, prompting a deluge of mocking tweets online.
And yet still, amid all of this, Trump is defending himself, because clearly to simply
ADMIT FAULT would be the embarrassing option here.
[blink] But what’s so disgusting about Trump’s
annual roleplay as weatherman is that he’s spent the better part of a week trying to
“protect” a state that was NEVER in any danger, and yet he’s STILL ATTACKING Puerto
Rico a year AFTER Hurricane Maria hit, which that saw more lives lost than on 9/11.
I guess even the POTENTIAL for lives lost in a red state is still worth more to Trump
than actual lives lost in a place with no political upside for him.
And look, this might seem like a petty and obvious distraction from the White House,
but it’s a clear testament to his mental unfitness.
If he’s so narcissistic that the most powerful man on earth will spend five days fixating
on weather maps, imagine what OTHER lengths he would go to not to admit fault.
Imagine if he misspoke about the target of a missile launch and bombed the wrong country
anyway because he was too proud to correct himself.
When you take into account his rapidly declining mental health with the fact that he is physically
incapable of admitting he was wrong, you’re left with a horrifying recipe for disaster.
Sure, it’s sad and mostly pathetic when it’s a sharpie on a weather map, but don’t
forget that this guy has the nuclear codes.
But while we expect this degree of narcissism from Trump, it’s watching the entire Republican
party humiliate itself to defend his rambling, incoherent tirades that’s especially sad.
It’s watching a party that just lost the House by the biggest margin in modern American
history continue to dig in its heels on a proven losing strategy.
Trump is objectively the least popular president in living memory, so to see the whole GOP
predicate its success on falling in line behind him, to watch them defend his disregard for
the rule of law, circumventing Congress to spend taxpayer money where he sees fit, enriching
himself when federal officials and foreign dignitaries stay at his properties, when the
Secret Service is forced to rent golf carts to keep up with him on his perpetual vacations,
that is so remarkably pathetic for a party that dares call itself patriotic.
The truth is that for the Republican Party, there is absolutely no coming back from this
after the president leaves office.
And so while it might seem politically convenient NOW to hitch their wagon to Trump’s, the
fallout will be EVEN more humiliating than that one time they defended the guy who used
a sharpie to alter the path of a hurricane rather than simply admit he made a mistake.