As Hurricane Harvey continued to devastate Houston and the surrounding areas, it soon became clear that President Trump’s response to the disaster was destined to be laughing stock.
On Wednesday morning, Trump tweeted that he’d seen the destruction from the storm “firsthand,” but that account was soon challenged by reporters who said the President’s on-the-ground account of the destruction was secondhand at best.
Our reporting does not match claim that @POTUS witnessed any horror or devastation first hand. #harvey https://t.co/KP4ejyLVpF @dallasnews https://t.co/HBObIh9Tgt
— Todd J. Gillman (@toddgillman) August 30, 2017
https://twitter.com/AndrewBeatty/status/902889563030519812
Unsurprisingly, the pro-Trump Twittersphere tried to change the subject to Obama with a bit of revisionist history and took to Twitter to complain that Obama ‘didn’t do enough’ when Hurricane Katrina hit Louisiana in 2005.
The fraudulent claim became so widespread that the fact-checking site Snopes.com had to publish an article reiterating that George W. Bush was president when Katrina hit, not Barack Obama.
From Snopes:
The argument that Obama did not do enough after Hurricane Katrina lashed New Orleans, however, ignores the fact that Obama was not president at the time. Katrina made landfall in August 2005, during George W. Bush’s presidency.
Obama — who was a Democratic Party senator representing Illinois when the storm hit — was not elected president until November 2008. However, Obama did meet with Katrina evacuees on 5 September 2005 in Lubbock Texas alongside former Presidents Bill Clinton and George H.W. Bush.
As Snopes points out, a 2013 PPP poll found that 29 percent of Republicans thought Obama was to blame for the disastrous federal response to Katrina, while another 44 percent couldn’t decide whether it was Bush’s or Obama’s fault.
Featured image via Snopes
