The President’s Dorian/Sharpie Affair

 Follow the Twists If You Can

On September 1, 2019, during Hurricane Dorian, President Trump tweeted that “Florida … South Carolina, North Carolina, Georgia, and Alabama, will most likely be hit (much) harder than anticipated” by Hurricane Dorian.  Although the National Weather Service (NWS) station in Birmingham was unaware of Trump’s tweet at the time, it received so many calls from anxious citizens that, twenty minutes later, NWS responded:

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.

Several hours later a top-level official from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), the parent organization of the NWS, warned the NOAA staff against contradicting the president.  An agency-wide, confidential directive told them to “only stick with official National Hurricane Center forecasts if questions arise from some national level social media posts which hit the news this afternoon.”

Then, four days later, after many defenses of his statement, the President defended his position by showing a map of the hurricane’s projected course.  A crude, obviously hand-drawn-with-a-Sharpie semi-circle, had been added to the map that included Alabama in the projected path.

We all rolled our eyes.  What bizarre trick would President Trump try next?  Did he really think no one would notice?  Why didn’t he just acknowledge immediately or ignore the understandable mistake in his first tweet, and we would all have moved on? 

A day later, September 6th, NOAA moved in again, issuing a carefully-worded, unsigned statement that criticized the objective data on which the Birmingham report was based thus supporting President Trump. 

Reporters wrote that this second NOAA statement contradicting the Birmingham office was the result of heavy pressure from the Trump Administration, especially the Commerce Department’s head Wilbur Ross and presumably the President. 

Then three days later (Sep 9th) at a routine conference, the director of the National Weather Service, Louis Uccellini, objected to NOAA’s statement and praised the work of the Birmingham office, saying its staff members had acted “with one thing in mind, public safety” when they contradicted Mr. Trump’s claim that Alabama was at risk.

During the following week, Trump returned to the issue frequently, all along insisting that his initial statement that predictions showed the storm would hit Alabama was correct. 

The above is a long and complicated retelling, but it is important.  To recap:

June 1:

• Trump tweets that Alabama is at risk from Hurricane Dorian.
• Twenty minutes later, the Birmingham weather service contradicts the president.
• Several hours later, a confidential NOAA directive tells its agencies not to contradict the President.

June 5th: President shows a national audience his Sharpie-doctored weather map.
June 6th: NOAA issues statement critiquing Birmingham’s interpretation of statistics.

• Newspaper reports indicate that NOAA’s attacks on Birmingham were politically motivated.

June 9: the head of NWS praises Birmingham’s staff for its defense of public safety.

True, a few NOAH maps had included part of Alabama.  But those maps just showed increased winds up to 10 mph, hardly a danger.   As a neophyte weather forecaster, Trump could have misinterpreted the maps. This is the kind of error, however, that anyone not familiar with the intricacies of interpreting raw weather data could make.  But he kept at it long after news reports correcting him had appeared.  Had the President simply acknowledged or ignored his error, it would have immediately dropped from the news.  But acknowledging error is not something that this President does. 

So, why am I making such a big deal of this?  What’s new here?  How does this series of events endanger democracy any more than President Trump’s other lies and disparagements of government? 

Washington Post columnist Catherine Rampell writes,

Sure, Trump’s attacks on objective statistics, scientists or really any independent source of accountability are nothing new.  On the contrary, such attacks have become ubiquitous.  Anyone who dares to produce or even accurately report on politically inconvenient metrics is allegedly participating in a vast anti-Trump conspiracy or is somehow rooting for America to fail.

And, at this point, media corrections of Trump’s false claims about stock performance, or air purity, or the strength of the manufacturing sector, can feel tedious, pedantic and exhausting.  Trump’s just being Trump, pundits scold.  We should all move on to “real” concerns rather than these distractions from whatever other horrible (or, depending on your viewpoint, wonderful) things the Administration is doing.

But these are real concerns.  Trump’s attempted manipulations of official metrics — and the aspersions he casts upon metrics he cannot manipulate — degrade our democracy, economy and public safety.

Distrust in official data (my italics) is deadly to voters’ ability to evaluate public policies, as well as the records of the officials crafting or overseeing those policies.

The difference is that President Trump has enlisted a government agency to participate in protecting him by deliberately falsifying objective data.  If we cannot trust even government numbers, what can we trust?

Even before Sharpi-gate (as it has been named), 40% of Americans already said they either completely or somewhat distrust data about the economy reported by the federal government. 

Even before NOAA’s caving to pressure from the Trump administration, the willful ignoring of data had become common, eg the studies showing no significant voter fraud.  But that’s different from distrusting the falsified raw numbers.  I have always considered mistrust of raw government numbers themselves a little paranoid.  What official government agency would stoop to giving us the wrong numbers for political reasons? 

But here we are.  Democracy has taken another hit.  George Orwell’s 1984 — with the bureau that goes back and “corrects” previously published statistics — seems closer than ever.