Horowitz: Sharpie-Gate

Tuesday, September 10, 2019

Rob Horowitz, GoLocalWorcester MINDSETTER™

President Donald Trump

In the early days of the Trump Administration, when the president said something that was flat out wrong, there were at least some Administration officials and cabinet members who were willing to plainly say so, refusing to twist themselves into pretzels to either explain away or defend the indefensible.

On Russia meddling in the 2016 election, for example, when Trump would continually state flat out untruths, equivocate and downplay, National Intelligence Director Dan Coates, FBI Director Christopher Wray, and Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis, among others, would straightforwardly say that the Russians had interfered in the 2016 presidential election and it was critical to take action to prevent it from happening again.

As more of the so-called “adults in the room” have left the administration, replaced by people whose main qualification is there unquestioned loyalty to Trump, these needed corrective statements have become few and far between. The new normal of the Trump Administration--if you can use normal and Trump in the same sentence--is to scramble as best as possible to back-up the president, no matter how much of one’s own credibility or the credibility of the national government is lost in the process.

That is what makes ‘Sharpie-Gate’ more than a punchline for Steven Colbert or Bill Maher. For those who have been mercifully away from their television sets, computers and smartphones for the past week or so, rather than admit that he wrongly tweeted that Alabama was likely in harm’s way from Hurricane Dorian, President Trump has spent a week or so communicating misleading information to the public in a flailing attempt to convince people that he didn’t make a mistake, going so far as to use an official government weather map, doctored by a sharpie to include Alabama in the forecasted line of fire, when it simply wasn’t at the time his original tweet went out as a visual.

More specifically, President Trump inaccurately tweeted that Alabama would “most likely be hit (much) harder than anticipated” when forecasts at the time had removed that state from the Hurricane’s path. Twenty minutes after the president sent out this wrong information, The National Weather Service’s Birmingham office, doing their job, sent out a correction reassuring the people of Alabama that they were no longer at risk of damage from the Hurricane. Over the past week or so, Trump has devoted more communications energy into attempting to prove he was right, when even Fox News has reported he is wrong, than to providing reassurance, guidance, and direction to victims of Hurricane Dorian.

But Trump’s actions, while disturbing--were predictable--the kind of reflexive dishonesty that has earned him the distrust of the overwhelming majority of the American people. More dangerous is the willingness of even government agencies with well-earned reputations for independence and integrity to back up his false claims. As the Washington Post reported on Sunday, twice since Trump’s original tweet went out, employees of the National Weather Service received “agency-wide directives" to not publicly contradict the president. Even worse, this past Friday, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration(NOAA), which supervises the National Weather Service, put out a misleading statement rebuking the Birmingham office for their accurate and needed correction and providing a thinly veiled defense of the president. The unsigned statement, in which the political leadership of the agency shredded their own credibility and damaged the agency’s, was roundly condemned by former heads of the agency, weather professionals, and scientists. As Michael Halpern, a deputy director at the Union of Concerned Scientists told the Washington Post, “It makes me speechless that the leadership would put [Trump’s] feelings and ego ahead of putting out weather information accurately. If we’re politicizing the weather what is there left to politicize? We’re seeing this kind of clampdown of scientists across the government, and it’s been an escalating trend."

To paraphrase Flannery O Connor, “The truth does not change according to Donald Trump’s ability to stomach it.” With a president as mendacious as Trump, it is even more important for cabinet officials and agency heads to refuse to back-up obvious false-hoods and lies. That is the difference between public service and political hackery. And right now, unfortunately, public service in the Trump Administration is in short supply.

Rob Horowitz is a strategic and communications consultant who provides general consulting, public relations, direct mail services and polling for national and state issue organizations, various non-profits, businesses, and elected officials and candidates. He is an Adjunct Professor of Political Science at the University of Rhode Island.