Donald Trump is obviously "fact" challenged

Echo opinion published in the St. Louis Post Dispatch by Editorial Board

Last summer, Trump mistakenly warned that Hurricane Dorian threatened the Alabama coast. Days later, rather than admit error, he displayed a government weather map clumsily altered with a Sharpie marker, as if to confirm his erroneous claim. 

In a postscript, a federal watchdog last week chided the administration for threatening government scientists who had the audacity to contradict Trump with facts.

“Sharpiegate” today looks like an early harbinger of what would later go so wrong with America’s pandemic response: Now, as then, this Trump ignores science and puts his personal interests above the good of the nation. Worse, people around him — people who clearly know better — (ugh!) enable this dangerous behavior.

On Sept. 1, Trump tweeted a warning that Dorian would hit Alabama “harder than anticipated.” In fact, the storm wasn’t on track to hit Alabama at all (!); Trump’s warning was based on outdated information. Honest mistake. About 10 minutes later, the National Weather Service office in Birmingham, fielding panicked calls from the public, tweeted that “Alabama will NOT see any impacts from #Dorian.”

That’s where it should have ended. But according to a new government watchdog report, top federal officials had to divert their attention from the approaching hurricane to focus instead on soothing a bruised presidential ego — to the point of threatening the weather officials.

It “appears as if the National Weather Service intentionally contradicted the president,” then-White House Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney said in an email to Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross, the watchdog report states. “And we need to know why. [Trump] wants either a correction or an explanation or both.”

The obvious response should have been, Well, the president was mistaken. But Trump, bizarrely, cannot admit making even the smallest error, ever. So weather officials were warned that “there are jobs on the line,” according to the report.

Ultimately, the administration issued a statement that the weather office shouldn’t have said Alabama was safe. Even though it was.
The report, by Commerce Department Inspector General Peggy Gustafson, concluded the administration “unnecessarily rebuked NWS forecasters for issuing a public safety message about Hurricane Dorian in response to public inquiries — that is, for doing their jobs.” She warned it could undercut public confidence in weather experts during future storms, potentially endangering the public.

As Trump has demonstrated repeatedly during the pandemic, he couldn’t care less about endangering the public. Just as he’d rather undermine trust in weather experts than admit a small error, he’d rather let the coronavirus engulf America than admit his response to the crisis has failed and needs to change.

This isn’t just a matter of outsized ego. As indicated by Sharpiegate — and as confirmed by Trump’s pandemic misinformation, his dangerous reopening demands and his maskless rallies — there is something psychologically wrong with this president. But what is the excuse of the Mulvaneys and Rosses of this administration?