
President Donald Trump insisted once again on Thursday that initial weather forecasts put Alabama potentially within Hurricane Dorian’s destructive path, blasting media accounts of his dubious meteorological claim as “Fake News in order to demean!”
“In the early days of the hurricane, when it was predicted that Dorian would go through Miami or West Palm Beach, even before it reached the Bahamas, certain models strongly suggested that Alabama & Georgia would be hit as it made its way through Florida & to the Gulf,” Trump tweeted.
“Instead it turned North and went up the coast, where it continues now,” he continued in a second post. “In the one model through Florida, the Great State of Alabama would have been hit or grazed. In the path it took, no. Read my FULL FEMA statement. What I said was accurate! All Fake News in order to demean!”
Trump on Wednesday was the subject of mockery after an Oval Office storm briefing in which he showed off an apparently doctored National Hurricane Center projection of Dorian’s early trajectory that appeared to be hand-altered to include Alabama.
But when asked about what looked like a conspicuous Sharpie mark on the federal forecast at an event later in the afternoon, Trump repeatedly said “I don’t know,” and announced the White House would issue “a better map” with “many models” advising that “in all cases Alabama was hit, if not likely, in some cases pretty hard.”
Trump on Thursday morning also retweeted a map plotting Dorian’s potential paths that he first posted online Wednesday evening, which was dated Aug. 28 and appeared to originate from the South Florida Water Management District.
“This was the originally projected path of the Hurricane in its early stages,” Trump wrote in that message.
“As you can see, almost all models predicted it to go through Florida also hitting Georgia and Alabama. I accept the Fake News apologies!”Trump’s decision to defend his dubious meteorological warning about Alabama comes as Dorian has strengthed into a Category 3 storm bearing down on the coast of South Carolina.
Article originally published on POLITICO Magazine