Trump is trapped in the airy fabulations of his own mind

If you’ve managed to turn your tired bloodshot eyes away from Westminster over the past week, you might have noticed that America has been enjoying an elemental struggle of a very different kind. Washington D.C. experienced “topical” storm Donald, a freakishly spiralling body of hot air that placed itself over a very difficult spot from which it then refused to budge.

It all began – as does so much these days – with a tweet. Trump took to Twitter to warn people about hurricane Dorian, a category 5 storm that was threatening the eastern seaboard. “In addition to Florida – South Carolina, North Carolina, Georgia, and Alabama, will most likely be hit (much) harder than anticipated,” he wrote. “Looking like one of the largest hurricanes ever.”

So far so reasonable, if you accept that Alabama wasn’t too far west to be affected by Dorian (in fact, the state has never been hit by a Cat 4 or 5 storm). The problem for Trump was that experts didn’t accept his forecast. The National Weather Service in Birmingham tweeted out the opposite advice, telling Alabamians that they would “NOT see any impacts from the hurricane.” That, however, didn’t end matters. On Sunday, Trump doubled down, telling reports that “Alabama is going to get a piece of it, it looks like”. Later in the day, he again said the same, noting that the hurricane “might get a little piece of a great place: it’s called Alabama.”

Fast forward through days of the same. More denials from pesky meteorologists who thought they knew more than the President, followed by more denials from Trump who insisted he was right and they were wrong. By Wednesday, Trump was in the Oval Office wagging his finger at a map. He was desperate to be proven right. In fact, he was so desperate he had clearly been wagging something else. He’d used one of his trademark black Sharpies to amend the map, extending the hurricane’s cone of influence to make sure it included Alabama. When the media didn’t accept it, Trump used Thursday to attack the media. He said it was “fake news” and demanded an apology.

Step aside from the sheer outlandish quality of the story – of a president who would use a Sharpie to alter a projection so it would entirely fit with his version of reality. All of this might be considered trivial if it didn’t go some way towards explaining another story that emerged this weekend.

The President revealed, on Saturday, that the peace talks he was due to hold with Taliban leaders would no longer be taking place at Camp David. The news was greeted with astonishment. Not that peace talks were a surprise but that, before peace had been agreed, Trump should have extended an invitation to Camp David to America’s enemy. One of the most powerful responses came from the daughter of a former Vice President. Liz Cheney wrote that “Camp David is where America’s leaders met to plan our response after al Qaeda, supported by the Taliban, killed 3000 Americans on 9/11. No member of the Taliban should set foot there. Ever.” She moderated it a little by adding “The President is right to end the talks”, but that is pure Trump-era logic. The President gets praised for stopping an outrage that he was ready to perpetrate.

The President inviting Taliban leaders to the US would be shocking if this were anything other than Trump’s White House. He’s already invited Kim Jung-Un to visit and North Korea’s leader is still pursuing a nuclear programme, still threatening his neighbours, and doing everything that made him the leader of a pariah state under successive Republican and Democratic presidents.

Yet, as we saw with the hurricane story, this is about explaining marginal behaviour. Experts might agree that the truth lies closest to consensus but, in this new world of political expediency, the “truth” lies closest to whatever data you can find to support your own bias. Right-wing media quickly noted that President Reagan had met with Taliban leaders in the White House and social media was soon flooded with photographic evidence of the meeting. Again, it’s all cogent if you ignore the nuance and the fact that we can inspect the original contact sheet at the Reagan Library. The roll is dated 2 February 1982 and is annotated with the words “Afghan witnesses”. These weren’t warlords currently killing American troops, but mujahedeen fighters trying to kick Russia out of the country. Between these differences lies a gulf of political meaning.

What the two stories show us is how Trump leans towards any data, plot, interpretation or evidence that favours him. His world view is binary. Experts might tell us that good and bad, right and wrong, and even true and false only get us so far and what matters more is the degree to which things tend towards those absolutes. For Trump, however, one path predicted that Dorian would take it through Alabama and that, he thinks, should be enough to prove him right.

This is perhaps why Trump’s own National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) stepped into the argument (allegedly under some political pressure), controversially rebuking the Birmingham office. “The Birmingham National Weather Service’s Sunday morning tweet spoke in absolute terms that were inconsistent with probabilities from the best forecast products available at the time,” they said. It’s noticeable that the word “absolute” is doing all the work.

The more nuanced explanation is that Trump was less right than forecasters. He picked the least correct path because he was, for some reason (perhaps political, perhaps electoral) already fixated on Alabama. In doing so, he also demonstrated the worst way to read weather predictions. Each path predicted by the computer model might have equal weight when plotted but they are not given equal weight when interpreted. What wasn’t important was the errant plot taking the hurricane far to the west. It was the dozens of other plots that confirmed that it was likely to snake up the east coast (which, incidentally, is exactly what happened).

The distinction is key. This is isn’t about Trump’s weather forecasts but how he views forecasts in general. This is about the value he ascribes to outliers. We already know this from the egregious way he cherry-picks favourable polls and any argument, no matter how outlandish the source, that supports his world view. He is more likely to accept the advice of the favourable deviation as he is to the unfavourable advice of multiple experts. It also suggests how easy it is to play this president. Bad economic forecast to break to him? Bury it alongside an alternative forecast that he will favour. Want a trade deal that favours your country? Slip it in the appendices and spend most of your time talking about the advantages to be had for Scottish golf courses and spa hotels.

In a way, of course, this doesn’t tell us what we didn’t know. It really adds data to our growing model of this presidency. That model suggests that this president has set a course towards the airy fabulations of his own mind and not a single plot suggests he’s about to make landfall back on the coast of reality.