NEW YORK — President Donald Trump doesn’t make mistakes. At least according to him.

Trump’s relentless justifications of his erroneous warnings that Hurricane Dorian was threatening Alabama on Sunday, which created days of ridicule and skepticism, are just the latest example of the president’s lifelong reluctance to admit an error, no matter how innocuous.

His fervent, dayslong pushback has displayed not only his prolonged focus on a personal spat but his willingness, notably again late on Thursday, to deploy government staff and resources to justify an inaccurate claim. Presidential proclamations can move markets, rattle world capitals and, in this case, unnecessarily alarm the residents of a state. Trump’s relationship with the truth and accountability threatened to, yet again, diminish the weight of any president’s words.

“Great presidents admit when they’ve screwed up, they fix it, and they move on,” said presidential historian Jon Meacham. “Right now, it is a mistake about a hurricane hitting a state. But it can also be a far bigger deal and cost people lives and help create a climate where people can’t trust the government.”

This was far from the first time Trump has refused to admit a mistake. Examples range from the harmless, like his assertion that he had the largest inauguration crowd in history, to the more serious, like his claim of widespread voter fraud in 2016 that led to the establishment of an election commission to try and back up his claim.

This particular Trump tempest, as so often, began with a tweet.

On Sunday, the president warned that Alabama was “most likely to be hit (much) harder than anticipated.” By then, however, Alabama faced no threat at all from Dorian, as the National Weather Service quickly declared.

Rather than dropping it, Trump went into overdrive defending his alert, and he was still at it four days later.

On Wednesday, Trump displayed a map of Dorian’s projected path that showed the cone of uncertainty covering much of Florida but stopping in its panhandle. Until, that is, an extension was added in black marker that covered a swath of Alabama.

The president, who is known for his love of Sharpies, pleaded ignorance about the ad hoc alteration. “I don’t know, I don’t know, I don’t know,” he responded when questioned.

That night and the next day, he took to Twitter to again insist that certain storm tracking models proved he was right. He tweeted outdated maps, he pushed White House staff to support his claims, and he doubled down — eight times over — on his erroneous forecast.

“In the one model through Florida, the Great State of Alabama would have been hit or grazed,” he said in one of the tweets. “What I said was accurate! All Fake News in order to demean!”

Then, late Thursday, the White House put out an official statement from Rear Admiral Peter J. Brown, the president’s homeland security and counterterrorism adviser.

It was he, Brown wrote under the White House letterhead, who briefed Trump on Sunday, showing him the official National Hurricane Center forecast but also a number of other models, which “showed possible storm impacts well outside the official forecast cone.”

The running controversy, stirred daily by the president, has electrified social media, with (hash)Sharpie trending on Twitter and jokes galore. But, for some, it has become a new referendum on Trump and his fitness for office.

“I’m really worried. I feel sorry for the president,” said Democrat Pete Buttigieg, the South Bend, Indiana, mayor who hopes to take Trump on in the 2020 election. “And that is not the way we should feel about the most powerful figure in this country.”

But White House allies defended the president and accused the media of preferring to overreact.

“This president gets the worst press of any president in the history of the republic,” said Geraldo Rivera, a reporter and Trump confidant. “Everything he says and does is cross-checked and scrutinized to reveal him to be stupid, uninformed or a liar.”