President Trump made dire predictions Thursday for Hurricane Dorian’s potential landfall, warning that the storm was likely going to “hit very hard” and “be very big.”
The storm is forecast to become a major hurricane on Friday and possibly hit Florida’s east coast early next week.
“The winds seem to be building at a tremendous rate. It looks like winds are going to be unbelievably high,” Trump says in a pretaped video he posted on Twitter. “Hopefully we’ll get lucky, but it looks to me that this time it’s heading in one direction, all indications are it’s going to hit very hard and it’s going to be very big.”
Trump notes that “we got lucky” because the storm mostly grazed Puerto Rico. Earlier this week, as Hurricane Dorian threatened the island, Trump taunted the U.S. territory in a series of tweets.
“Wow! Yet another big storm heading to Puerto Rico. Will it ever end?” he tweeted. In a later tweet he wrote that he’s “the best thing that’s ever happened to Puerto Rico.”
In the video, taped in the Rose Garden, Trump speaks directly into the camera for a minute and a half about the looming storm.
Trump canceled a trip abroad to stay back in Washington to monitor the storm. Trump owns four properties, including his Mar-a-Lago resort, along the eastern coast of Florida.
“It’s looking like it could be an absolute monster,” Trump says. He adds that someone told him it could be “bigger or at least as big as Andrew,” referring to the 1992 Category 5 hurricane that devastated Florida.
