Donald Trump shows fake Hurricane Dorian map to validate his incorrect tweet that storm threatened Alabama
- Trump points to map with black loop extending hurricane’s path
- President made baseless claim that Alabama would be affected
To the annals of American political scandal, we must now add Sharpiegate.
In the Oval Office at lunchtime on Wednesday, US President Donald Trump held a briefing on Hurricane Dorian.
At one point, the president held up a National Hurricane Centre (NHC) map from August 29, displaying the hurricane’s track and intensity.
Bizarrely, someone had apparently used a Sharpie, a kind of marker pen, to add a black loop falsely extending the hurricane’s path from Florida to Alabama.
It was apparently a belated effort to justify Trump’s previous baseless claim that the latter state could be affected.
The ham-fisted, homespun addition triggered uproar on social media and a frenzy of speculation over whether the president himself, or perhaps some lackey eager to impress, was responsible.
Altering official government weather forecasts is against the law.
Trump denied all knowledge. According to The Washington Post, when he was asked about the doctored map later on Wednesday, Trump said his briefings had included a “95 per cent chance probability” that Alabama would be hit.
Asked if the chart had been drawn on, he insisted: “I don’t know, I don’t know”.
Over the weekend, as Dorian bore down on and then brutally struck the Bahamas, the president issued a torrent of tweets. One mistakenly warned that Alabama would be impacted, potentially spreading panic.
Apocalyptic scenes after Bahamas pulverised by monster Hurricane Dorian
Just 20 minutes later, the National Weather Service in Birmingham, Alabama, 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 Trump is not one to admit he was wrong, whether over crowd sizes or how much of his border wall has been built.
In his Oval Office remarks, the president argued that on the “original chart”, Dorian was going to hit Florida directly “and that would have affected a lot of other states”.
“But that was the original chart,” he said.
The original NHC map, showing the probable path of the storm, can still be seen online.
Some saw the episode as the latest in the Trump administration’s war on reality.
Bill Kristol, director of Defending Democracy Together and a conservative critic of Trump, posted sarcastically: “Who among us hasn’t altered a National Hurricane Center forecast with a Sharpie?”
