White House in the eye of a shitstorm after tweeting out wrong hurricane-ravaged airport
The Trump administration hasn’t handled any of the recent natural disasters that have left swaths of the country submerged very well. First, the president himself was so confused by the notion of charity that he asked his sworn enemies in the media for help making a $1 million donation to Harvey relief efforts before deciding to hold off entirely. Then, when Hurricane Irma was poised to make landfall, Trump struggled to pronounce such an “exotic” name. If you want more damning proof, there’s the fact that Trump rescinded an executive order from his predecessor that mandated building flood-damaged properties higher and stronger before promising to rebuild Texas higher and stronger.
The latest gaffe is more social media blunder than outright fiasco, but it continues the White House’s disturbing trend of misinformation. Trump’s director of social media and assistant Dan Scavino Jr.—who first began working for the stale circus peanut at his National Golf Club Westchester—was dutifully sharing news about Irma via his verified Twitter account when he posted a video which was purportedly of a Hurricane Irma-ravaged Miami International Airport. The problem was that it wasn’t actually MIA in that video.
The airport brought this error to Scavino Jr.’s attention soon after he shared it. He deleted the tweet, then tried to play things off by claiming he was too busy retweeting and posting videos to pay attention to all the videos he was retweeting and posting.
But Scavino Jr. never apologized for failing to vet the video in his capacity as White House social media director, which has to involve more job duties than scraping Twitter for compliments about the president or white supremacist memes for him to share. MSNBC, CNN, and HuffPo have all picked up the story of Trump’s surrogate’s erroneous post, but the president will undoubtedly label their reporting as the real “fake news.”