Trump wants the government and the GOP to be as loyal to him as his business was

Washington Post logoOne week ago, with Hurricane Dorian swirling in the Atlantic off the coast of Florida, President Trump’s mistakeabout there being a risk to Alabama was a quick flash that hadn’t attracted much attention. He’d tweeted about that risk well after any serious threat had passed, but since he’d done so on the Sunday of Labor Day weekend, few people noticed. A number of people in Alabama did, however, and they called in to local authorities, prompting the National Weather Service in Birmingham to clarify publicly that no such threat still existed. As of Monday afternoon of last week, that’s where it lay.

Until Trump decided to complain publicly about an ABC News report noting the Alabama mistake. That Monday evening, the president disparaged ABC News’s Jonathan Karl as a “lightweight,” insisting Alabama was at risk. It was a refrain he kept up all week, heightening the conflict by altering an old hurricane map with a marker to make Alabama appear to be more at risk and, later, changing his claims to center on the threat of wind damage. At the time of his tweet, Alabama faced a small chance of 40 mph winds, a threat that has become the formal rationalization for Trump’s tweet.

More importantly, though, we’ve seen how Trump and his administration have attempted to police this nonsensical claim.

View the complete September 9 article by Philip Bump on The Washington Post website here.