Donald Trump Won’t Let ‘Alabama’ Hurricane Gaffe Go, Spends 6th Day Insisting State Was In Dorian’s Path
Donald Trump began his Friday morning posting a series of tweets in which he once again insisted that he “properly” claimed that the state of Alabama was in the path of Hurricane Dorian. When he first issued the claim on September 1, he was immediately corrected by the National Weather Service, as The Inquisitr reported.
Minutes after Trump tweeted that Dorian “Alabama, will most likely be hit (much) harder than anticipated” last Sunday, the NWS branch in Birmingham, Alabama took to its own Twitter account to reassure state residents that “no impacts from Hurricane Dorian will be felt across Alabama. The system will remain too far east.”
But the president has not been able to acknowledge the fact that he made even a partial error, and with his Twitter posts on Friday, has now brought the bizarre controversy into its sixth consecutive day, writing, “The Fake News Media was fixated on the fact that I properly said… Alabama may also be grazed or hit. They went Crazy, hoping against hope that I made a mistake (which I didn’t).”
Trump went on to call media reports of his Alabama gaffe “nonsense.”
However, the Friday tweets came just two days after Trump, in an Oval Office briefing, presented a map of the hurricane’s path which he, personally, had altered with a black Sharpie pen in an attempt to show the storm affecting Alabama — which the unaltered map did not otherwise show, as The Inquisitr reported.
As CNN.com reported in a timeline of what they described as Trump’s “Alabama meltdown,” following the Oval Office briefing that has come to be known as “Sharpiegate,” Trump continued to offer questionable evidence to support his Alabama claim. The president took to Twitter to post images of weather maps that were already four days old by the time he made his claim that Alabama would be “hit harder” than expected.
While the maps did, in fact, show that the National Weather Service had at that time estimated a five percent chance that some sections of Alabama could feel storm-force — though not hurricane-force — winds, the map also showed the states of New York and Delaware with the same, low probability of feeling mild effects of the storm. None of the maps indicated that Alabama would be hit “hard.”
By Sunday, when Trump made his first claim about Alabama, no forecast models showed Dorian hitting Alabama at all.
His pair of tweets on Friday would bring the total number of Twitter posts made by Trump claiming that he was correct with his Alabama hurricane claim to 11, according to a Washington Post story Thursday which counted nine Trump tweets on the topic prior to the Friday postings.
