A lethal hurricane's trumpification transformed a forgettable flub into a presidential feud that was unforgettable. This week, with the easy swipe of a black Sharpie, the tone of the whole Trump presidency was recorded.

Presidential Donald Trump's ill-timed, incorrect but well-intention-ed Twitter warning at the beginning of the week extended Thursday into a five-day presidential feud, transforming a forgettable fact check of his words into an epic storm of assaults as the president constantly doubled down and crept in.

Trump’s latest move of promulgating false information, blaming the media for the coverage of it and then subsequently turning that controversy into a seemingly pointless multiday story reminded current and former White House aides, advisers and Trump allies of all the times in business and government he has leaned on the same playbook of never, ever backing down:

whether it was the value of his real estate business or the crowd size at his inauguration or his statements about Chinese tariffs.

“There are a lot of statements he makes to protect his base, but this is not him protecting his base. His base does not care about the hurricane,” said Barbara Res, a former executive vice president of the Trump Organization, who worked for Trump on and off from 1978 until 1998. “This is a personal thing. He just can’t be wrong.”

Thursday marked the fifth day that Trump was fixated on the idea that the state of Alabama was in the path of deadly Hurricane Dorian, which devastated the Bahamas and is now off the southeast coast of the U.S.

Since Trump canceled a weekend trip to Poland to monitor the weather threat, news about Hurricane Dorian dominated the president’s already prolific Twitter feed.

He’s retweeted information from national TV news networks about the perceived strength of the storm, satellite images from the National Weather Service and short videos of him attending FEMA briefings about Hurricane Dorian.

The flood of information has given Americans the sense that the president is both closely monitoring the hurricane but also that his involvement is at the center of it.

His fact feud started Sunday with a presidential Twitter warning mentioning Alabama among the states likely to be hit “much harder than anticipated.”


The National Weather Service office in Birmingham quickly corrected him online, writing on Twitter: “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.”