Donald Trump Himself Drew On Hurricane Map With Sharpie To Show Alabama In Path, ‘Washington Post’ Reports
Hurricane Dorian plowed into North Carolina on Thursday night after causing at least four deaths and raking the southeastern coast of the United States with 110 miles-per-hour winds, per The South Florida Sun Sentinel. Meanwhile, Donald Trump continued to fixate on his debunked claim that the state of Alabama was in the path of the storm, refusing to acknowledge that he made the claim in error.
In fact, shortly after 3 p.m. on Thursday, as the storm was pounding South Carolina, Trump summoned Fox News White House correspondent John Roberts into the Oval Office, where he told Roberts that his warning to Alabama on Sunday was correct, according to a CNN report. Trump told Roberts that he was “just looking for acknowledgment that he was not wrong for saying that at some point, Alabama was at risk,” according to an internal Fox News email sent by Roberts and obtained by CNN.
Since he first made his claim in a tweet that Alabama would be “hit much harder than anticipated” on Sunday, as The Inquisitr reported, Trump has posted nine more tweets insisting that he was correct after numerous media outlets reported that none of the projections of the storm’s trajectory would take the hurricane into Alabama.
In one tweet, Trump posted four maps appearing to show that initial projections had indeed showed the hurricane hitting Alabama.
Just as I said, Alabama was originally projected to be hit. The Fake News denies it! pic.twitter.com/elJ7ROfm2p
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) September 5, 2019
But those maps were dated August 29, four days before Trump posted his Twitter warning that Alabama would be hit hard by the storm, as Mashable tech editor Marcus Gilmer noted via Twitter, adding that the maps were “outdated and inaccurate.”
“If anything, this shows that Trump’s tweet on Sunday was based on three-day old information which is horrific in this sort of situation,” Gilmer wrote.
In addition, the maps appearing in the above Trump tweet showed only a 5 to 10 percent chance that Alabama would be hit by winds over 39 miles per hour, well below hurricane-level strength.
Perhaps most alarmingly, during a Wednesday briefing on the hurricane in the Oval Office, Trump displayed a map of the hurricane’s “cone” that appeared to have been crudely altered with a Sharpie felt pen, showing the hurricane reaching Alabama, as The Inquisitr reported.
Initially, it was unclear how the Sharpie marking was added to the map, or by whom. But on Thursday, a Washington Post report revealed that, according to a White House source, it was Trump himself who personally drew on the hurricane map with a Sharpie.
“No one else writes like that on a map with a black Sharpie,” the White House official told The Washington Post.
