Mystery White House Tweet: Snow During January Heat Wave

The White House released this since-deleted Tweet Sunday night
announcing the first snowfall of the year. At the time it was 53
degrees in Washington DC after a day that brought a high of 70 degrees.

Record setting high temperatures were reported up and down the East Coast of the United Sunday (though not here in northern Vermont, that's for sure!)

Boston reported 74, degrees, which is the hottest tempeature on record for any January day there. Records keeping on this score started in Boston back in 1872.

Down in Washington DC it got up to 70 degrees on Sunday. After dark, temperatures slipped back to a stil-balmy 53 degrees.

At that point, when it was 53 degrees, the White House decided to release a tweet. It had a photo of what appeared to be snow falling around the White House, with a message, "First snow of the year!"

Obviously being Twitter, everybody piled on to that White House tweet.  They abandoned the beach, the outdoor barbecues or whatever to respond very unkindly. After all, it was the dumbest tweet anyone had seen in this young year of 2020.

"It's 52 degrees. It's snowing in DC to the same extent that Trump is innocent. These folks aren't even competent at lying," groused Neal Katyal, (@Neal_Katyal)  a Supreme Court attorney.

"It was 70 degrees in DC. WTF is wrong with these people. They literally lie about the dumbest things," Tweeted Josh Kail (@THATJoshKail).

To be fair, the response to the strange White House tweet was maybe, well, unfair.

 It did snow in Washington DC last Tuesday, so it's possible the White House meant to post its snow message then, but more important things, like the Iran crisis got in the way.  It was probably a draft Tweet that was accidently published.  The photo in the tweet was indeed taken this past January 7, when it was for sure snowing in Washington.  That January 7 snow was the first of the season in Washington.

However, the Trump administration has certainly had a, um, problematic, relationship with meteorology and the truth. He lied about the rain at his inauguration.  And then, we have the famous hurricane Sharpie incident.

You remember that. Last year, Trump mistakenly said that Alabama was one of the state's being threatened by Hurricane Dorian.  Rather than just correcting a simple mistake he made about Alabama and Dorian, Trump doubled down.

As Alabama meteorologists tried to calm the state's residents by assuring them Hurricane Dorian would miss that state, he insisted he was right. He even added some embellishments to a hurricane forecast map with a Sharpie in a sad attempt to make it look like Alabama was indeed threatened.

I think more people would have ignored the White House's "snow" on Sunday had the Trump administration, especially Trump himself, been a more honest person in general.

But that ain't ever going to happen, is it?