Maybe his memory’s a little foggy, or maybe he’s just trying to block them out, but President Trump seems to be having a hard time remembering any Category 5 hurricane, even though there’ve been quite a few during his presidency.
He even seems to forget such things exist — like he did twice in less than 15 seconds, in a FEMA briefing on Saturday, as Hurricane Dorian started to close in on the Bahamas.
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“I’m not sure that I’ve ever even heard of a Category 5, I knew it existed,” Trump stated, then added moments later: “A Category 5 is something that, I don’t know that I’ve even heard the term other than that I know it’s there.”
There have been 45 Category 5 hurricanes since Trump was born in 1946, 27 in the Atlantic and 18 in the Pacific — and seven of these storms occurred since he became president.
In September 2017, Trump exclaimed about Hurricane Irma, “I never, never knew a Category 5 existed,” and then about a week later, when Hurricane Maria hit Puerto Rico, he called it “a Category 5 storm, which literally never happens.”
As for Dorian, its strength hasn’t been the only point of confusion: Trump said in one of his early-warning tweets that Alabama would be hit, and the National Weather Service promptly issued a correction with all caps: “Alabama will NOT see any impacts from Dorian.” But that didn’t stop Trump from standing by his original claim in a later tweet thread.
