The kind of thing at least one Twitter user earlier faulted the press for focusing on. This map shown by the president changed the track of a hurricane, which actually impacts people’s lives. https://t.co/l885GX6AXd— Maggie Haberman (@maggieNYT) September 4, 2019
If you take the trouble to watch this graphic, which tracks the predicted path of Dorian from Sunday, August 25th, through September 9th, you'll see it was predicted to enter Florida as late as Friday, August 30th. By 8 p.m., however, the track was predicted to go north from central Florida, and moved progressively away from Florida, save for the coastal areas, from Friday at 11 p.m., on.
This was the advisory on Saturday at 11 a.m.
Please note the predicted track of the storm. Trump had tweeted basically the correct information two hours earlier:11am Advisory from @NHC_Atlantic raised Dorian's max sustained winds to 150mph! Going forward, intensity fluctuations are likely. The forecast track was also nudged slightly eastward but track reasoning remains largely unchanged. Still, FL is very much at risk for impacts! pic.twitter.com/DeQ00YAn45— NWS Tallahassee (@NWSTallahassee) August 31, 2019
Looking like our great South Carolina could get hit MUCH harder than first thought. Georgia and North Carolina also. It’s moving around and very hard to predict, except that it is one of the biggest and strongest (and really wide) that we have seen in decades. Be safe!— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) August 31, 2019
Almost 24 hours later, however, Trump tweeted his infamous "Alabama beware!" tweet.
In addition to Florida - South Carolina, North Carolina, Georgia, and Alabama, will most likely be hit (much) harder than anticipated. Looking like one of the largest hurricanes ever. Already category 5. BE CAREFUL! GOD BLESS EVERYONE!— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) September 1, 2019
And then today he releases a video showing an altered map with the "original" prediction, which still doesn't show the hurricane threatening Alabama, except in the imagination of someone with a sharpie. And he has no answers for that:
So the serious question is: what kind of mental and emotional decline or disability does this story illustrate? 24 hours after releasing the correct information, Trump either mis-remembered what he was told, or tossed in Alabama because it sounded like another state in the South he'd heard of that had a coastline, and then he had to defend himself because that's what he does, he defends himself.
Even when it's as petty and stupid and ignorant as this. Which leaves another question: what did he do with the rest of his day?
A reporter just now asks about the map Trump showed in the Oval Office today, which looked like the president may have used a Sharpie to draw a circle to intersect Alabama.— Felicia Sonmez (@feliciasonmez) September 4, 2019
Trump ... doesn't say no.
"I don't know. I don't know. I don't know," he says.
President Trump says he doesn’t know about the hurricane map being altered by a Sharpie. He also insisted there are “other, better maps” that show Alabama was in the area that could be affected by Hurricane Dorian, though the weather service said that’s not true.— Kaitlan Collins (@kaitlancollins) September 4, 2019
In his mind, he knows he's right; and that's part of the problem. Because this is what he said in justification for his new video:
Which, looking at the NOAA link above, is complete and utter bullshit. And the strange part is, he seemed to know better 24 hours before he knew worse. And now he's sticking to the "worse", clinging to it for dear life.
“No, I just know that Alabama was in the original forecast,” Trump said. “They thought it would get a piece of it. It was supposed to go — actually we have a better map than that, which is going to be presented where we had many lines going directly, many models, each line being a model, and they would go directly through and in all cases Alabama if not lightly in some places pretty hard. Georgia, Alabama was a different route. They actually gave that 95 percent chance probability. Turns out that is not what happened, it made the right turn up the coast.”
Which, looking at the NOAA link above, is complete and utter bullshit. And the strange part is, he seemed to know better 24 hours before he knew worse. And now he's sticking to the "worse", clinging to it for dear life.
Even when it's as petty and stupid and ignorant as this. Which leaves another question: what did he do with the rest of his day?
“It looks like he’s not even trying, but he thinks he’s trying. To him, all the watching TV and tweeting is work, so he believes he’s on the clock 24-7, 365.” https://t.co/sjFcjoKAaG— Eli Stokols (@EliStokols) September 4, 2019
No comments:
Post a Comment