Why Trump is the Sharpie president
The pen may be mightier than the sword, but the Sharpie is not mightier than the storm.
A White House official says it was President Donald Trump himself who used the black Sharpie to doctor an official government map, which he then displayed during an Oval Office briefing, to falsely add Alabama into Hurricane Dorian’s potential pathway.
“No one else writes like that on a map with a black Sharpie,” the White House official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal deliberations, told The Washington Post.
It was a botched attempt at saving face after the president mistakenly claimed over the weekend that the state was at risk long after it was in the clear. Rather than own the small mistake and move on – we all make mistakes – Trump has turned this into a five-day story. He’s tweeted nine times and posted five maps about the subject. Last night, he even directed the National Security Council to release a 225-word statement from a rear admiral defending him.
The Sharpie has long been one of Trump’s blunt instruments of choice, but this week it’s become a symbol just as potent as the MAGA hat. It’s louder, bolder and less delicate than the classier and more conventionally elegant pens that have historically occupied the White House. Just like Trump.
His Sharpie squiggles on the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration map are worth more than 1,000 words. Trump seems unable to admit mistakes, no matter how trivial, because he appears to see such concessions as a sign of weakness. He becomes easily distracted by detritus at the expense of tackling the existential challenges facing our country, from climate change to the national debt.
“I know it’s a minor episode, but I hope that doctored map makes its way into the Smithsonian someday. Like Washington’s uniform or Jefferson’s desk, Trump’s bogus map embodies the man,” writes columnist Eugene Robinson. “As smooth moves go, it was lamer than trying to forge a $100 bill by taking a Monopoly $1 bill and writing a couple of extra zeros on it.”
Forcing senior aides to contort themselves in defense of his false statements is a feature, not a bug, of the Trump administration. This dates to Sean Spicer’s monologue on crowd sizes after the inauguration, which set the tone for everything that’s followed. Aides have tried to substantiate Trump’s specious claims that he was wiretapped, that millions of votes were illegally cast by undocumented immigrants and that Middle Easterners had joined the caravans approaching the southern border. He said that right before the midterm elections during the same speeches in which he claimed that a plan was in the works to cut middle-class taxes by 10 percent. It hadn’t been, but then staff scrambled to make it seem like an idea that was actually under consideration. The list goes on and on.
“Even when Trump mistakenly tweeted the nonsensical word ‘covfefe’ late one night, the president, instead of owning up to a typo or errant message, later sent Spicer to declare, ‘I think the president and a small group of people know exactly what he meant,’” recalls the AP’s Jonathan Lemire.
As Trump put it in 2016, “I think apologizing’s a great thing, but you have to be wrong. I will absolutely apologize, sometime in the hopefully distant future, if I’m ever wrong.”
Or, as George Orwell wrote in “1984,” 2+2=5.
Trump has a notorious history of struggling to let certain things go once he becomes fixated on them. In April 1988, Spy magazine mockingly referred to Trump as a “short-fingered vulgarian” in a satirical advertisement for “The Art of the Deal,” which was on the bestseller list at the time. The co-founder of that magazine was Graydon Carter, who would go on to lead Vanity Fair for a quarter of a century. In October 2015, Carter said that the insult still got under Trump’s skin. “To this day, I receive the occasional envelope from Trump,” he wrote. “There is always a photo of him – generally a tear sheet from a magazine. On all of them he has circled his hand in gold Sharpie in a valiant effort to highlight the length of his fingers. I almost feel sorry for the poor fellow because, to me, the fingers still look abnormally stubby.”
Thursday afternoon, Trump beckoned Fox News correspondent John Roberts to the Oval Office after a 3 p.m. live shot to make the case that he was correct about Dorian – because Alabama had been in the potential path early on – and to complain about anchor Shepard Smith’s coverage on his show, according to internal Fox emails leaked to CNN’s Jake Tapper.
Sharpies have played a starring role in several of the most memorable moments from this epoch. In his tell-all book, former West Wing communications aide Cliff Sims recounts in detail a private huddle in which he and Keith Schiller, the president’s longtime bodyguard and confidant, helped Trump draw up an enemies list with a Sharpie on White House stationery. “We’re going to get rid of all the snakes, even the bottom-feeders,” Trump told the men, according to Sims’s account in “Team of Vipers,” released in January.
During a listening session after the massacre last year at a high school in Parkland, Florida, Trump held a note card in his hand with a basic reminder of emotional empathy. “I hear you” was written out in Sharpie.
When an outbreak of tornados killed 23 people in Alabama this March, Trump visited the state. He used his Sharpie to sign several Bibles at a Baptist church that had been converted into a relief center.
Two days before he became president, Trump tweeted a picture of himself holding a legal pad at Mar-a-Lago while looking earnestly into a camera. He wrote that it was an image of himself composing his inaugural address. He was upset at that time about stories on which aides were drafting the speech, and he wanted to insist that he wrote it himself. In that picture, Trump is holding a closed Sharpie. The pad looks brand new.
An auction house sold a doodle this spring that Trump once drew in gold Sharpie of the Manhattan skyline. In it, Trump Tower dominates neighboring skyscrapers. In real life, it doesn’t. Trump has long claimed that the building he named after himself has 68 stories. In fact, it has 58.
THE CALL — Sunday, September 8, 2019