In case you somehow missed it — in recent days, President Donald Trump has been melting down over media coverage of his mistaken pronouncement that Alabama was poised to feel effects from Hurricane Dorian. Following the appearance in an Oval Office meeting of a map of Dorian’s path that had a Sharpied-on portion adding a portion of Alabama to the threatened area, the Trump 2020 campaign is now selling black markers with Trump’s signature printed in gold on the side in an attempt to “own the libs” or something. Trump has not admitted to altering the forecast map to try and prove himself right, but the Trump campaign seems to be embracing the incident as part of the unsettling (at best) Trump show anyway.
Trump campaign manager Brad Parscale tweeted along with a link to buy the markers:
‘Buy the official Trump marker, which is different than every other marker on the market, because this one has the special ability to drive @CNN and the rest of the fake news crazy! #KeepMarkersGreat’
Buy the official Trump marker, which is different than every other marker on the market, because this one has the special ability to drive @CNN and the rest of the fake news crazy! #KeepMarkersGreathttps://t.co/eakgICM0LR
— Brad Parscale (@parscale) September 6, 2019
Soon after, Parscale tweeted a claim that “hundreds” of the markers had already been sold. On the one hand, there’s a possibility that he’s lying, since he’s engaged in tactics like inflating rally attendance by including groups like people who waved to Trump at an airport. However, there’s also the possibility that the sale of hundreds of black markers with Trump’s name on them in an attempt to own the libs or something is really just indicative of how far Trump’s supporters will go to throw their support behind his belligerence.
An incident of the president of the United States refusing to admit a basic mistake and instead taking coverage of that mistake as indicative of some kind of conspiracy against him should not be swept under the rug.
As MSNBC host Chris Hayes put it on Twitter Thursday night:
‘I mean this seriously: the Alabama obsession really feels…clinical at this point? I mean if someone in your life was acting this way, you’d be legit concerned.’
As recently as Friday morning, Trump railed on Twitter:
‘The Fake News Media was fixated on the fact that I properly said, at the beginnings of Hurricane Dorian, that in addition to Florida & other states, Alabama may also be grazed or hit. They went Crazy, hoping against hope that I made a mistake (which I didn’t). Check out maps’
What, like the maps you yourself altered, according to one report in The Washington Post?
By the time Trump made the claim about Alabama, the state was so solidly in the clear that the National Weather Service posted a public statement countering him. Trump could be launching some kind of leadership initiative in light of the utter absurdity of Hurricane Dorian, which has repeatedly flown past projected top-outs and is now sparking fears of hurricane-force conditions in Canada — but he’s not. Instead, he’s sticking to angrily tweeting about people pointing out that he’s talking about threats from the storm that don’t actually exist.
Featured Image via screenshot
