Oh, Donald, Donald, Donald. This man can never admit when he’s made a mistake. As powerful Category 5 Hurricane Dorian made its way toward the U.S., Donald Trump first used Twitter, which is now the White House press briefing room, to issue an official presidential warning about the deadly storm churning in the Caribbean.
The problem was, by the time Donald Trump sent the tweet, Hurricane Dorian was not going to hit Alabama, which the National Weather Service Birmingham folks quickly noted.
Obviously you don’t want to send an entire state or region into hurricane panic if it isn’t necessary. You see, the information in Trump’s tweet was already two days old and in hurricane terms, that means the information was completely obsolete.
Needless to say, criticism of Donald Trump began to mount. The notoriously thin-skinned Donald can never admit a mistake. No retreat. So, he continued to double down, holding multiple press gaggles, using Twitter to chastise his critics and three days later, unable to let it go, holding another meeting, this time in the Oval Office, where he gathered reporters for a photo op with weather experts and glossy, oversized maps to warn of the impending hit to the coastal states. And that’s when he pulled out the now infamous map with the Sharpie bubble that included Alabama in the projection.
Had Donald Trump actually used a Sharpie pen to change an official government weather map to save face? Yes, yes he did. In fact, it is now confirmed Donald Trump himself used the pen to draw the bubble. And that, my friends, is how you launch a thousand hilarious memes. So, without further ado, let’s get to the memes:
The Washington, D.C. City Council’s social media crew got in on the act:
Sen. Jeff Merkley and Merriam-Webster couldn’t resist:
Five days later, Donald Trump is still at it, still trying to cover for his inaccurate statements.
If you made it this far, congratulations! Now that you’ve had a good laugh, let’s get serious for just a minute. What Donald Trump did was not only illegal, it was cover for his own laziness, incompetence and dereliction of duty. You see, Donald Trump did not spend the weekend meeting with the heads of the agencies responsible for monitoring these deadly storms. He spent the weekend golfing. Again.
Jamie Pietruska, an associate professor at Rutgers University, wrote in The Washington Post about the history of the legal statute that makes it a federal crime to advertise false or altered forecasts and maps and precisely why the law is important. Donald Trump has the ability to create real harm with fake forecasts.
The president undermined such trust, and while his stunt might be written off as fodder for late-night comics, it’s no joking matter: Falsified forecasts can put lives at risk, something the National Weather Service has been protecting us from for more than a century.