But it’s also illuminating to look at this as part of a much larger pattern: 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.

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By my count, this has happened at least seven times:

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.”

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That appears to be happening once again with Sharpie-gate. The initial official forecasts, as Philip Bump demonstrates, decidedly did not include Alabama in the target zone of the hurricane. But Trump claimed that Alabama would “most likely” be among the areas hit, prompting frantic official denials out of the state.

Then, on Wednesday, a video in which Trump shows off the new chart in which a black line does loop Alabama into the storm’s target zone was released — on the official White House Twitter feed.

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As Politico notes, someone inside the administration appears to have done the doctoring of the chart, which might have broken a law against falsely representing weather forecasts. But it’s unclear who: When pressed by reporters on what happened, Trump repeatedly said, “I don’t know.”

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.

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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.

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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. For what it’s worth, that’s a downgrade from another Trump rage-tweet claiming that “almost all models” said this.

Why bother? One likely explanation is that Trump sees admitting error as a form of fatal weakness. As I detailed in my book, Trump has a long history of crafting illusions about himself, going back to his reality TV days and his spinning to New York tabloids, and it was a natural transition for him to segue into wielding rank disinformation as a political weapon, as a species of power.

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In this telling, admitting to having gotten something wrong on the facts is akin to allowing for the existence of such things as controlling factual reality and sincere, fact-based argumentation in search of genuinely agreed-upon truths.