This was wildly wrong for several reasons other than the false Alabama warning. The storm had shifted northward and further out to sea, so while still a threat, it was not the storm of the century Trump was making it out to be. Indeed, Alabama wouldn't even see the much less severe tropical storm winds.
Accordingly, the National Weather Service within minutes once again stressed on Twitter: "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."
Nevertheless, at a press briefing hours later, Trump babbled away about the hurricane hitting Alabama. "This just came up, unfortunately. It’s the size of the storm that we’re talking about. So, for Alabama, just please be careful."
This for a state that was due to see nothing more severe than winds under forty miles-per-hour.
At this point, any normal human being would have said something like "Sorry, I misspoke. The hurricane will not reach Alabama." But Trump isn't any normal human being. He's incapable of admitting he was ever wrong.
So he kept doubling down on his false warning over and over again, as he has done much of this week. He insisted that the original forecasts said the hurricane might reach Alabama, which was true.
But that doesn't excuse falsely warning about the storm striking Alabama when it had become obvious it wouldn't. Severe weather forecasts change regularly. Trump seems not to be able to grasp that concept.
Another sorry chapter to this mess came when Trump summoned the acting secretary of the Department of Homeland Security to the Oval Office with a map in tow, looking like he would have rather been undergoing painful dental surgery, to demonstrate to the media how a much earlier forecast showed the storm might hit Alabama, even though it was already hundreds of miles to the north. Once again, he seemed to think weather forecasts were carved into stone.
And then the big reveal came: the map Trump showed to the media as "proof" had obviously been doctored with a black marker and inexpertly so. As well, press photos from last Friday showed Trump with the same map before it was clumsily doctored. Media reports also revealed Trump had doctored the map himself.
This whole farce led Philip Bump at the Washington Post to write a stinging piece (link here) about how Trump's Alabama ranting was positively Orwellian. In George Orwell's masterpiece 1984, the oppressed masses were forced to believe obvious lies without question. "In the end the Party would announce that two and two made five, and you would have to believe it."
Trump's supporters, his humiliated acting secretary, and the rest of his staff keep insisting the President was never wrong about his Alabama warnings. The rest of us can see the obvious sham that this all was.
Trump was still ranting about Alabama on Twitter last night, streaming message after message about a week-old now irrelevant forecast, ignoring the fact that the actual storm is battering the Carolinas.
And, of course, this is not the first time Trump and his people have tried to fabricate "evidence" that Trump's massive lies are, indeed, truth. The first example came early in his presidency, when Trump ordered staff to doctor inaugural crowd photos to show that his was much larger than President Obama's, when the opposite was true and easily proven with unaltered photos.
To this end, Greg Sargent at the Washington Post wrote a companion piece (link here) about six other incidents in addition to the inaugural fiasco and the Alabama fiasco when Trump's staff fabricated "proof" to back up the President's lies.
Election Day is in less than fourteen months. It's time to end this travesty of a presidency.
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