Trump didn’t tweet about this one doozie of a false alarm
An alert caused a panic when it went to people's cellphones Saturday morning about a missile strike, but shortly after, authorities said it was a mistake. Credit: Edwin Lim
President Donald Trump had little to say immediately after a false missile alert Saturday spread a nuclear-raid panic in Hawaii that took nearly 40 minutes for the state to correct.
So far he’s mostly underscored the state’s confessed blame.
“That was a state thing, but we are going to now get involved with them. I love that they took responsibility. They took total responsibility,” Trump told reporters on Sunday.
“But we are going to get involved. Their attitude and their — I think it is terrific. They took responsibility. They made a mistake.”
The president didn’t say how the White House or federal officials would “get involved with them.” The commander-in-chief is not big on trying to plainly explain complicated things to the public even when they don’t involve national security.
Trump seemed to be referencing an announcement from the Federal Communications Commission — which has wireless alert systems under its purview — that it will review the incident.
Hawaii officials said an employee made the wrong selection from a “drop-down” computer menu. He thus activated a launch warning rather than an internal test alert, and thus has reportedly been reassigned in the wake of the confusion.
Twitter once again became part of the governmental story.
Some people interviewed in Hawaii said they first heard the alert was wrong from a tweet 15 minutes after the fact by Rep. Tulsi Gabbard (D-Hawaii), whose own message preceded the official state retraction. She has 174,000 followers.
Trump did not use his Twitter account to reach out to Hawaiians. Three hours after the alert went out, he did tweet. But it repeated aggrieved generalizations about the news media and ignored the blunder.
Worldwide, Trump has 32.4 million followers on his main account and another 18.8 million on @POTUS.
By all accounts, the president, who was on the golf course during another Mar-a-Lago vacation when panic struck the 50th state, had White House aides do the appropriate notifying, responding and internal discussing.
A former Obama administration Pentagon official, David Granfield, took what some saw as a cheap shot when he tweeted:
“I was thankful that the president was golfing, because that means there was less of a chance that he would have acted rashly and find Americans — and others — real harm.”
Political shots can run different ways.
Former Maricopa County, Arizona, sheriff Joe Arpaio, whom Trump pardoned in a criminal contempt of court case, and who is now running for the U.S. Senate, had his own take on Hawaii’s frightening fiasco.
Interviewed on Fox News, Arpaio, who proclaims Trump his political hero, said, “There’s something wrong with that [state’s] government . . . They can’t even solve a phony document.”
Arpaio still openly subscribes to the discredited claim that President Obama’s Hawaii birth certificate was fake.
Dan Janison is a member of the Newsday editorial board.
