It was Trump who used a black Sharpie to mark up an official National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration map, which he displayed during an Oval Office briefing on Wednesday, according to a White House official who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal deliberations.
“No one else writes like that on a map with a black Sharpie,” the official said of the map, which added Alabama into the hurricane’s potential pathway inside the loop of the marker.
Several White House officials argued that media coverage of the Alabama issue has been unfair to Trump, but one senior administration official said that “as long as it’s in the news, he is not going to drop it.”
Trump has recently fixated on minor points of grievance that aides and Republican lawmakers would prefer he avoid, such as former aide Anthony Scaramucci, actress Debra Messing and an Axios story that said he proposed bombing hurricanes to stop their progress.
