The New York Times is reporting that the National Weather Service’s retraction of its correction of Trump originated in the Oval Office.
President Trump, seeking to justify his claim of a hurricane threat to Alabama, pressed aides to intervene with a federal scientific agency, leading to a highly unusual public rebuke of the forecasters who contradicted him, according to people familiar with the events.
In response to the president’s request, Mick Mulvaney, the acting White House chief of staff, told Wilbur Ross, the commerce secretary, to have the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration publicly correct the forecasters, who had insisted that Alabama was not actually at risk from Hurricane Dorian.
I don’t have the slightest difficulty believing this. I worked as a geotechnical engineer in central Florida during the 1980s, a period of spectacular growth there following the opening of Epcot, and much of the work involved Trump-like land developers. Few of them believed that facts ought to get in the way of the good times, and a lot of engineering firms and architects were totally willing to be … expedient … to keep them happy. I don’t know about New York City, but it probably isn’t much different there.
So it wouldn’t surprise me a bit if Donald Trump believes facts are mutable, and has never been told otherwise by the technical people in his orbit.