Trump abused power in hurricane debacle
It will only get worse as 2020 election heats up
President Donald Trump crossed into literal old-man-yells-at-clouds territory with his one-man crusade to retroactively change the weather. For a while, it was amusing, in a baffling sort of way. But nobody’s laughing now.
Inaccurate weather information can endanger lives. And new reports suggest that Trump was not only wrong, he and members of his administration pressured scientists to back him and undercut the front-line forecasters at the National Weather Service.
“Sharpiegate” began with Trump’s outdated Sept.1 tweet that Alabama was in the path of Hurricane Dorian. “In addition to Florida — South Carolina, North Carolina, Georgia, and Alabama, will most likely be hit (much) harder than anticipated. Looking like one of the largest hurricanes ever. Already category 5. BE CAREFUL! GOD BLESS EVERYONE!”
Within 20 minutes, the National Weather Service in Birmingham, desperate not to cause unnecessary panic, sent out a tweet correcting the president’s error: “Alabama will NOT see any impacts from #Dorian. We repeat, no impacts from Hurricane #Dorian will be felt across Alabama. The system will remain too far east.”
Mistakes like this can happen, especially when you are trying to get a handle on events in real time. The important thing is that those mistakes are corrected, as happened here. Anyone else would have shrugged their shoulders and moved on. Not Trump.
A few days later, in a bizarre effort to convince America that Alabama really had been at risk from Dorian, Trump appeared in the Oval Office with an official National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration map that had been altered with a felt tip pen. He spent the week insisting he was correct. All this culminated Friday with an unsigned statement from NOAA that said Trump had been right on Sept. 1 and the National Weather Service was wrong.
Just the start of bending truth
The statement pointed to models showing that, when Trump sent his tweet, there was a less than 10% probability of a tiny sliver of eastern Alabama seeing winds of at least 39 miles per hour. National Weather Service forecasters were correct to publicly contradict Trump’s freelance hurricane warning. It was shameful for NOAA to throw them under the bus. There’s a reason the statement wasn’t signed.
You would have hoped that predicting the weather would be one area of government activity immune to improper presidential influence, but no. In fact, The Washington Post and The New York Times, citing unnamed senior administration officials and people familiar with the events, reported that Trump himself pressured his staff to contradict the Birmingham forecasters. All of this is cause for grave concern. First, it’s a public display of Trump’s flagrant disregard for expertise and his refusal to admit error. It’s one thing to see him show an old weather map hand-corrected with a Sharpie. But will he do the same thing with intelligence data on North Korea’s missile program? That wouldn’t be quite so hilarious.
Second, Trump’s apparent willingness to force federal agencies like NOAA to publicly bend the truth in support of his favorite version of reality is unlikely to be limited to weather maps. Does anyone really think that he won’t apply the same pressures to the Bureau of Labor Statistics if the unemployment figures start to “contradict” him, or the Bureau of Economic Analysis if growth starts to slow?
Finally, it has become increasingly obvious that there’s something wrong with the president, and it’s getting worse. His obsession —there’s no other word for it — with convincing people he was correct about Alabama being in Dorian’s path is deeply unsettling.
Expose improper influence
Perhaps most disturbing of all is Trump’s belief that his hand-corrected weather map would somehow prove something. This is delusional and evidence of an inability to think critically. His claim that he had never heard of an actual Category 5 hurricane even though there have been three others during his presidency is further evidence of serious cognitive dysfunction. Last October, Hurricane Michael was a Category 5 when it made landfall in Florida. This isn’t the sort of thing a person forgets, especially a person in charge of disaster response.
In an email to his staff that was later made public, Craig McLean, NOAA’s assistant administrator for research, said he is investigating the “very concerning” episode. Beyond that, Sharpiegate gives Congress a perfect opportunity to pry the lid off the problem of improper presidential influence. There’s no classified data involved, and even Trump can’t claim executive privilege over weather reports.
Trump’s willingness to politicize everything from the Justice Department to the National Weather Service is going to be an increasingly serious problem as we head into the 2020 election. Exposing the details of his efforts to influence NOAA to some congressional sunshine will send a message: There will be accountability, so mind what you do. Congress may not be able to stop Trump from lying. But maybe it can help ordinary federal employees stand up for the truth.
Chris Truax, an appellate lawyer in San Diego, is an adviser to Republicans for the Rule of Law and a member of USA TODAY’s Board of Contributors.
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