Twitter users were quick to accuse the Donald Trump White House of pulling a snow job on Sunday night, when it claimed on Twitter to see the first snowfall of 2020 amid warm temperatures in Washington, D.C.
“First snow of the year!” the official White House account tweeted on Sunday night, shortly before 9 p.m. The tweet included a photo of the White House lit up against the black night sky with flakes of white seemingly falling in front of it.
Critics said there was just one problem: it couldn’t possibly have been snowing on Sunday night.
Weather records show the temperature in Washington, D.C., peaked at 21 C during the day and fell no lower than 9 C at night. That’s well above the 0 C freezing mark required to turn rain into snow.
Several Twitter users were quick to pounce on the potential inaccuracy, with many of them accusing the White House of lying about a seemingly inconsequential matter.
“I was wearing shorts this afternoon,” user James Fallows tweeted.
“Really?” tweeted user Lisa Swartz. “Do you people have to lie about everything?”
“Fake snowflakes for the snowflake in chief,” added user David Weissman.
“Not the first snow job,” wrote Facebook user Deborah Helms. “It’s been a blizzard of epic proportions!”
The White House did not specifically say the snow fell on Sunday. In fact, it posted the same photo on its Facebook account two days earlier, indicating that the photo was not taken on Jan. 12.
Weather records show D.C.’s first and only snowfall so far this year happened on Jan. 7. That’s when the photo was actually taken, the Washington Post reports.
The confusion sparked memories of other misleading weather claims that have emerged from the White House under the Trump administration.
Social media users mocked U.S. President Donald Trump last year after he showed a weather map in the Oval Office that appeared to have been doctored with a Sharpie marker. The Sharpie mark extended the projected path of a hurricane to include Alabama after Trump erroneously claimed the state might be hit.
The “Sharpiegate” moment was the highlight of a two-week effort by Trump to defend his own incorrect tweet about Alabama. In the end, the storm never hit Alabama.
Trump also previously claimed it stopped raining and the sun came out for his inauguration speech in 2017.
“It was almost raining, the rain should have scared them away, but God looked down and said: ‘We’re not going to let it rain on your speech,'” Trump said in a speech at CIA headquarters on Jan. 23, 2017.
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“The truth is that it stopped immediately. It was amazing. And then it became really sunny. And then I walked off and it poured right after I left.”
The truth is that it continued to rain during Trump’s speech, as video evidence shows.
Trump supporters hailed the White House’s snow photo on social media over the weekend, regardless of when it was captured. They also used it as an opportunity to accuse Trump’s critics of being “snowflakes.”
“Beautiful!” wrote user Monica Barrows on Facebook. “Well, not all the snowflakes on this thread, though.”
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