Official White House Photo by Shealah Craighead(WASHINGTON) — President Donald Trump is not backing down on his claim that Alabama could have been hit by Hurricane Dorian — even after government meteorologists disputed that was the case.
“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 Thursday morning.
The president first drew criticism for this claim Sunday after saying multiple times that Alabama was in the storm’s path, tweeting, “In addition to Florida – South Carolina, North Carolina, Georgia, and Alabama, will most likely be hit (much) harder than anticipated.” Soon after, the National Weather Service tweeted that was not the case. At about the same time, Trump repeated that claim to reporters at the White House, saying, “Alabama is going to get a piece of it, it looks like.”
During an Oval Office briefing on Dorian Wednesday, Trump clung to the idea by displaying a National Hurricane Center map that appeared to have a drawn-on semicircle appended to the “cone of uncertainty” showing the hurricane’s potential projected impact — extending the cone into Alabama.
“This is the original path that we thought — and everybody thought that this was about a 95% probability,” he said. “And it turned out to be not that path. It turned out to be a path going up the coast.”
Hours after the Wednesday Dorian briefing, at a different event in the afternoon, Trump later denied knowing how or why the map had been altered when asked if he could explain how the change was made.
“No, I just know, yeah. I know that Alabama was in the original forecast,” he said. “They thought it would get it, as a piece of it, it was supposed to go — actually we have a better map of that which is going to be presented, where we had many lines going directly — many models, each line being a model. And they were going directly through. And in all cases, Alabama was hit. If not likely, in some cases pretty hard. Georgia and Alabama, it was a different route. They actually gave that a 95% chance probability.”
“That map that you showed us today, looked like it almost had, like, a Sharpie written on it,” a reporter said during a second White House event on Wednesday.
Trump cut off the reporter and said, “I don’t know. I don’t know. I don’t know.” He also said the map had been from three or four days before, when it had actually been issued six days earlier.
White House deputy press secretary Hogan Gidley tweeted Wednesday night that the line was, in fact, from a black Sharpie, and he criticized the media for focusing on it.
At one point last Friday, one forecast map did show a cone that brushed the Alabama-Florida border, but it did not go nearly as far.
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