Trump doctored a hurricane weather map with a sharpie to show it going over Alabama

"Why do I have to repent or seek God's forgiveness," Trump asked an Iowa audience of evangelicals in 2015, "if I am not making mistakes?"¹ So when Trump mistakenly declared on September 1, 2019 that Hurricane Dorian was going to hit Alabama hard, instead of admitting and correcting his error, he changed the weather map for the hurricane by extending it over Alabama with a sharpie.²

On September 1, 2019, Trump tweeted that "In addition to Florida—South Carolina, North Carolina, Georgia, and Alabama will most likely be hit (much) harder than anticipated." This caused Alabama residents to panic.³ Only 20 minutes after Trump's tweet, the Birmingham division of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) tweeted that Alabama will not be affected by this storm.⁴ This tweet from the NOAA caused controversy and infighting within the organization as seniors were upset with the organization for contradicting Trump openly and Trump demanded that the organization back up his erroneous report.⁵

Trump, furious at being contradicted, continued to tweet, and crudely doctored a map of the hurricane forecast to include Alabama. On September 4th, Trump displayed this map in the Oval Office of Hurricane Dorian from August 29th that he had modified with a sharpie to extend the forecast area with a semi-circle around the state of Alabama, despite there still being no evidence of it in the forecast.⁶ Trump later called Fox News Senior White House Correspondent John Roberts into the Oval and stressed to him "that forecasts for Dorian last week had Alabama in the warning cone."⁷

In Trump's mind, his errors or delusions are always correct, whether he has to change a weather map with a sharpie to align with his mistaken forecast, or whether his claims, such as a crowd of thousands at a Detroit airport being all faked by AI, or Biden planning to take the Democratic nomination back, are patently delusional. The lies that Trump has told since 2015, have been tabulated in the thousands by news sources.⁸

1. David Cay Johnston, The Making of Donald Trump (New York: Melville House, 2016), p. 31
2. CNN, "Trump's Alabama map meltdown: A detailed timeline," September 6, 2019, https://www.cnn.com/2019/09/06/politics/fact-check-timeline-of-trumps-alabama-dorian-map-fiasco/index.html; The Washington Post, "NOAA staff warned in Sept. 1 directive against contradicting Trump," September 7, 2019, https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/noaa-staff-warned-in-sept-1-directive-against-contradicting-trump/2019/09/07/12a52d1a-d18f-11e9-87fa-8501a456c003_story.html; The Washington Post, "The Daily 202: Trump is the Sharpie president," July 17, 2020, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/powerpost/paloma/daily-202/2019/09/06/daily-202-trump-is-the-sharpie-president/5d71c446602ff171a5d7347c/; The Washington Post, "NOAA's chief scientist will investigate why agency backed Trump over its expert on Dorian, email shows," September 9, 2019, https://www.washingtonpost.com/weather/2019/09/09/noaas-chief-scientist-will-investigate-why-agency-backed-trump-over-its-experts-dorian-email-shows/; The Washington Post, "Not just Sharpie-gate: 7 other times officials tried to fabricate Trump's 'truth,'" September 5, 2019, https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2019/09/05/not-just-sharpie-gate-other-times-officials-tried-fabricate-trumps-truth/.
3. CNN, September 6, 2019, op. cit.
4. Ibid.
5. The Washington Post, September 7, 2019, op. cit.; The Washington Post, September 9, 2019, op. cit.
6. CNN, September 6, 2019, op. cit.
7. Ibid.
8. The Washington Post, "Trump's false or misleading claims total 30,573 over 4 years," January 24, 2021, https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/politics/trump-claims-database/; The New York Times, "Trump's Lies," December 14, 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/06/23/opinion/trumps-lies.html; The Washington Post, "President Trump made 18,000 false or misleading claims in 1,170 days," April 14, 2020, https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2020/04/14/president-trump-made-18000-false-or-misleading-claims-1170-days/; The Washington Post, August 12, 2024, op. cit.; The New York Times, "Many Politicians Lie. But Trump Has Elevated the Art of Fabrication.," August 7, 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/07/us/politics/lies-trump-obama-mislead.html; Bloomberg, "My Lawyers Got Trump to Admit 30 Lies Under Oath," June 12, 2017, https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2017-06-12/trump-s-history-of-lies-according-to-biographer-timothy-o-brien.