NOAA’s weird, unattributed statement is not being well received.

The Post’s Greg Sargent:

It’s not just Sharpie-gate. This is part of a broader pattern. I count at least seven glaring examples in which government officials have wheeled into action in an effort to make Trump’s lies, errors and obsessions into truths.

He wrote it up at the Post:

Again and again, government officials have wheeled into action in an effort to make Trump’s lies, errors and obsessions into truths, in some cases issuing “official” information explicitly shaped or doctored to do so.

He counts at least seven times this has happened. It started on day one, with the Crowd Size issue. He made Sean Spicer tell brazen lies, and he told his Park Service chief to find pictures that would back him up.

There were the many lies about voter fraud.

When Trump declared before the midterm elections that “criminals and unknown Middle Easterners are mixed in” with migrant caravans, multiple officials tried to bolster this claim by offering an official-seeming statistic about terrorism arrests that was entirely spurious and proved nothing of the kind.

When Trump vowed a surprise 10 percent middle class tax cut before the midterms, officials were caught off guard, but nonetheless sprang into action to try to create the impression this was a real promise by, for instance, discussing a nonbinding pledge. The tax cut never happened.

To justify suspending the credentials of CNN’s Jim Acosta after he annoyed Trump, then-White House press secretary Sarah Sanders shared a video that experts determined had been deceptively edited to make Acosta look physically abusive toward a press aide.

That’s like the faked weather chart – actually forging “evidence” to make his lies look true.

He told lies about violence against migrant women to whip up support for The Wall and an official tried to find evidence that would make them true.

To buttress Trump’s distortions of the migrant threat, the Department of Homeland Security produced a slick official presentation about the border that claimed nearly 4,000 known or suspected terrorists had been blocked from entering the United States. But this number had nothing whatsoever to do with efforts to cross the border, a distinction multiple officials also dishonestly fudged.

Some time ago, Dana Milbank noted that in multiple cases such as these, government officials are using “federal resources in vain attempts to turn the president’s lies into truth.”

Government officials are not supposed to use federal resources for that purpose.

One interesting question is why Trump doesn’t just concede he made a mistake — or, to get even more outlandish about this, try to learn from it.

After all, It’s not like this is one of the big, foundational lies Trump regularly tells to support the entire narrative of his presidency, such as the claims that he was totally exonerated by the special counsel probe, or that China is paying his tariffs, or that he inherited a horrible economy and converted it into the greatest economy in the history of this country.

By contrast, this was in all probability a mistake. Yet Trump has now kept this story going again, raging on Twitter that “certain models” did say Alabama might be hit.

Why? Because that’s how much of a jerk he is. A normal person realizes everyone makes mistakes and that it’s far better to admit them than to stick yourself with having to defend them forever. Trump is not a normal person: his ego is so precious to him that nothing is too contemptible or criminal when he wants to shield it. His vanity is more important to him than all the people alive today – he would see us all shoveled into a cosmic furnace rather than admit to a lie. Nothing on earth matters to him more than his own loathsome self.

Can you imagine a life lived that way? Everything there is in the world – oceans, birds, music, flowers, poetry, generosity, sunsets – as dust and ashes compared to him?

He’s the ultimate “sucks to be that guy.”