President Donald Trump Defends Use Of Altered Hurricane Dorian Forecast Map That Included Alabama
WASHINGTON (CBSMiami) – President Donald Trump is receiving criticism for displaying a Hurricane Dorian forecast map with a hand-drawn line that extended the storm's trajectory to include Alabama.
Trump defended the sharpie-altered map he used during a briefing Wednesday.
"We have better map than that which is going to be represented where we had many lines, many models, each line being a model, and they were going directly through and in all cases Alabama was going to be hit," he said.
The president later tweeted another map, saying that "almost all models predicted it to go through Florida also hitting Georgia and Alabama."
This was the originally projected path of the Hurricane in its early stages. As you can see, almost all models predicted it to go through Florida also hitting Georgia and Alabama. I accept the Fake News apologies! pic.twitter.com/0uCT0Qvyo6
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) September 4, 2019
The issue is that map was generated Aug. 28 – four days before the president warned residents in Alabama to stay safe.
"Now it seems to be going up towards South Carolina, towards North Carolina. Georgia's going to be hit. Alabama's going to get a piece of it, it looks like," Trump said on Sept. 1.
The White House is downplaying the episode accusing the media of playing it up to demean the president.
Deputy Press Secretary Hogan Gidley tweeted:
Absolutely right @realDonaldTrump! Watching the media go ballistic over a black sharpie mark on a map would be hilarious if it weren't so sad. The real news that matters here is a deadly hurricane continues up the coast and tens millions of Americans could be greatly impacted. https://t.co/SceSOeuyO5
— Hogan Gidley (@hogangidley45) September 5, 2019
Democratic presidential candidate Pete Buttigieg saw it differently.
"I don't know if he felt it necessary to pull out a sharpie and change his map. I don't know if one of his aides believed they had to do that in order to protect his ego," Buttigieg said. "No matter how you cut it, this is an unbelievably sad state of affairs."
Dorian continues to move up the east coast with millions of people in the Carolinas in its path.
The president tweeted again Thursday morning that Dorian was going to hit Alabama but then it took a different path and that the fake news knows this.