Trump’s Empty Numbers Syndrome
Trump’s whacky insistence on greatly magnifying every number he cites, from crowd sizes to illegal immigrants, threatens America's future. You can’t manage what you can't honestly measure, right?
The US economy expanded at a robust pace in the third quarter as household purchases rose 3.7% ahead of the election, led by a 32.7% jump in outlays on computers and peripheral equipment.
GDP (gross domestic product) increased by 2.8% annualized after rising 3% in the previous quarter, according to a government report. Just so we’re clear: Does this sound like the “third-world country” Donald Trump keeps telling us the U.S. has become?
In June 2022, when the country was still reeling from Trump’s failures in dealing with the pandemic, inflation sat at 9.1%. It’s now at 2.5%. As Jim Carville, the folksy strategist who helped Bill Clinton beat George H.W. Bush in 1992, notoriously said, “It’s the economy, stupid.” And the U.S. economy – destroyed by Covid – has been rebuilt virtually from scratch due to the hard work put in by Joe Biden and Kamala Harris.
Sure, some things in your local grocery store may still cost more. But I hope you’re enjoying your new IPhone or IPad, and your kid is enjoying their new computer. And how about that trip to Europe? Foreign visits are up 24% this year, according to the U.S. Travel Association. Maybe all this has come about because wages are up 3.97% between September 2023 and September 2024.
Maybe the economy et al isn’t quite as bad as Trump wants you to think. Numbers matter, folks; facts matter. Whenever I say something like that people line up to respond that numbers can be manipulated by dark unseen forces. Sure, if you look no further than your nose. But if you look deeper, you see what supports the numbers.
Apple, for instance, saw iPad sales surge by nearly 24% in the third quarter to $7.16 billion, and Mac sales grew 2%, reaching $7 billion for the quarter. HP's revenue from computer sales in the third quarter was $13.5 billion, a 2.4% rise. Yup, we are all buying expensive tech, even as we complain about the price of a loaf of bread.
There’s many reasons not to vote for Donald Trump, but the economy is no longer one of them. Maybe that’s why you don’t hear him railing about it quite so much at his rallies. Instead, he spends a lot of time complaining about what he describes as a pandemic of transgender, nonbinary, and other gender-nonconforming people invading our communities and threatening the young.
Want to know the numbers on that? Less than 2% of Americans identify themselves as part of this group, and my bet is that not one of them went to school one day and came home with their sex changed, as Trump has said. How about you?
Why is this such an issue then? Because they are a group with little political power on their own and, thus, easy to demonize without getting hit at the voting booth. Trump’s culture wars tend to focus on this sort of thing when the real threat is misinformation and disinformation about sex, gender, and sexuality.
Honestly, I was never a numbers guy until I went to work for Bloomberg News and started reading earnings reports and talking with analysts. Heck, I barely made it through my senior year of math at upstate Highland High. I remember Mrs. Wagner sighing deeply while scoring my second attempt at a test I needed to pass, and then saying with some resignation, “Okay, you got it.” I’m pretty sure she just wanted me out of her room at that point.
Want to know another number key to this election? In March, Trump said 15 million migrants were illegally in the US. In more recent rallies, he’s kicked that number up to 20 million, never citing a source for his numbers. But several organizations that have long issued authoritative data based on rigorous methodologies estimate that the unauthorized population is in the 11 million range.
“At a minimum, they're misusing statistics," David Bier, director of immigration studies at the libertarian Cato Institute, told Newsweek magazine in September. “I think they're invented. It's a bunch of overheated rhetoric and not based on reality."
Trump, who has portrayed immigrants as bringing lawlessness and crime to America, tweeted multiple times that “13,000 CROSSED THE BORDER WITH MURDER CONVICTIONS,” inferring that all this occurred during the Biden-Harris administration. But the data cited by Trump includes individuals who entered the country 40 years ago or more, not the last three years, according to Homeland Security, and includes “many who are under the jurisdiction or currently incarcerated by federal, state or local law enforcement partners.”
So, the dark unseen force manipulating the numbers in this case is the dark prince himself, Donald Trump, whose words and wacky numbers are megaphoned to Trump World by the likes of Fox News, The New York Post and others taking advantage of the siloed media world we now so sadly live in.
I could go on and on, picking at virtually every number the serial liar Trump cites, but you get the point. Is this a guy who will honestly tell us what’s really going on should he become president once again? He didn’t the first time and we suffered through a slow start against a worldwide pandemic as a result.
You can't manage what you can't honestly measure, right? What do you think?