Oops: Donald Trump is going to wish he hadn’t posted this latest Alabama hurricane map
Donald Trump has done it again. First he incorrectly claimed that Hurricane Dorian was going to hit Alabama hard. Then, after everyone from the media to his own federal government stepped in to correct him, he held up a map in the Oval Office that he had clearly drawn on with a Sharpie to make it look like Alabama was in the storm’s path. Now Trump has gone and made it even worse.
This afternoon Donald Trump tweeted four new maps, which he claims are proof that the hurricane really was on track to hit Alabama at the time he made the claim. The trouble: all of the maps have time stamps that are from several days before Trump made his proclamation. That means at best, he was spouting dangerously outdated information. But the other fine print makes it even worse for him.
One of Trump’s newly posted maps has this written at the bottom: “Areas within the outermost black contour have at least a 5% chance of receiving winds of 34+ kt (39+ mph).” Portions of Alabama are just barely within the outermost black contour on this map, meaning that it had a 5% chance of 39 mph winds. In other words, even if this map hadn’t been obsolete by the time Trump made his claim, it still wouldn’t have been evidence that Alabama was at risk of getting hit by anyone’s definition of hurricane force winds.
What’s remarkable is that Donald Trump is still at it. He just keeps making this worse for himself. “Sharpie gate” is already a humiliating scandal for him, and the longer he keeps trying and failing to prove that he was right, the more everyone keeps being reminded that he’s clinically insane and unfit for office. His original mistake was one thing; this is 25th Amendment level lunacy.
