President Trump’s social media director, Dan Scavino, spent most of Sunday sharing with the world videos of Hurricane Irma’s fury in Florida — of a spinning stop sign and streets becoming rivers.
He posted a photo of Trump and Vice President Pence in a briefing room, too: hands folded, faces somber as they studied the storm.
And in a late-afternoon tweet, Scavino wrote that he was regularly sharing his tweets with both men — offering as apparent example a video of Miami’s flooded airport:
Which raised a host of questions almost immediately, after Miami International Airport informed Scavino, Pence and the president that the video was fake.
Or, more accurately, that it’s not a video of Miami — or even of Hurricane Irma, apparently.
The White House did not respond to questions about why Scavino thought it was, or how he was verifying posts he shared with Trump — or how and whether Trump was using that information.
But the video appeared on YouTube and other sites more than a week ago, when what is now called Hurricane Irma was still far out at sea, as rains from Hurricane Harvey pummeled the gulf region.
The flooded runway in Scavino’s tweet was not in Miami, but in Mexico City, according to the video titles — though The Washington Post has not verified that.
For whatever reason, people started posting the clip on Twitter early Sunday afternoon, mislabeled as Miami.
And then, around 4 p.m. Washington time, Scavino erroneously lent the weight of the White House to the fake story.
He deleted the tweet soon after the airport corrected him. “It was among 100s of videos/pix I am receiving,” Scavino wrote. “In trying to notify all, I shared.”
It’s unclear what he meant by notifying all, or whether it was one of the posts he said he shared with Trump as he oversees the federal response to the storm.
In any case, Miami International Airport is busy correcting countless others who believed the White House.
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