People On Twitter Don’t Seem To Get That Obama Wasn’t President During Hurricane Katrina

Twitter users have been known to get a fact or two wrong every now and then, but their latest faux pas has left many people scratching their heads.

It all started when one Twitter user tried to defend President Trump’s response to the Hurricane Harvey disaster by criticizing Former President Barack Obama’s response to a disaster in Louisiana, according to popular Internet-myth-debunking site Snopes.

While the original tweet did not specify which Louisiana disaster the user was referring to – the infamous Hurricane Katrina or the lesser known floods that hit Louisiana in 2016 – many users took this to mean Obama went golfing instead of helping Katrina victims during his presidency.

And, unfortunately, they didn't seem all that interested in getting their timelines in order before they started tweeting.

Because there's one small (seemingly obvious) problem: Obama wasn't president when Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans. Katrina hit in 2005 during George W. Bush’s presidency, with Obama being elected into office a whole three years later. At the time, Obama was a Democratic senator representing Illinois.

This argument doesn’t only fail on the chronological side. It also fails to acknowledge that Obama did, in fact, meet with Katrina evacuees as a junior Senator, and can be seen in photos meeting with victims and displaced people alongside former Presidents George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton, according to Business 2 Community.

While it’s unclear how many of these tweets are serious and how many are trolls or bots looking to rile other users up, there were plenty of people who didn’t buy into the false claim and were seriously side-eyeing the anachronism.

"Where was Obama during Katrina?" sis............. pic.twitter.com/h6ET2N68k9

While the Internet's tendency toward misinformation is well-documented, this chronological hiccup is a worthy (if totally depressing) follow-up to the famous "Thanks, Obama!" meme.