Photo by Nick Hillier, Unsplash
Photo by Nick Hillier, Unsplash
Trump has a simple view of statistics and numbers. Those that make him look good in some way are real. Those that don't are fake and made up by his ever-increasing number of enemies.
There are lots of statistics Trump does not like. The most recent that it is impossible to be unfamiliar with is the June jobs report accompanied by the revised job numbers for previous months. These stats confirmed what everyone who has the ability to visualize consequences already suspected: that Trump is poison for the economy.
So of course he fired the person in charge of the Bureau of Labor Statistics. That’ll show all his equally math-challenged fans that all numbers that don’t go his way are faked.
Simply put, statistics are a measure of production or the results of that production. The numbers of people who got jobs or who lost jobs and went on unemployment are just a couple of examples. A statistic we are all most familiar with is income. How much money did we bring in or how much did our company bring in. Then there is expenses. How much did we have to spend to make that income, or buy groceries, gas, electricity, rent, mortgage payments, etc., etc.
As we move along through life we learn pretty quickly that there are actions we take that are going to result in increases or decreases in income and expenses. That ability to predict consequences is kind of innate for the majority of us. Meanwhile prisons are full of people who have some impairment of their capability of prediction and decide to take shortcuts to handle their income/expense statistics. These are the criminals of our society.
So what happens when one of these shortcut aficionados is somehow elected to the highest office in the land and starts to get reality-checked by the statistics resulting from his actions? To overstate the obvious, he’s going to really, really, really hate those numbers and will think nothing of shooting the messenger. In his mind he can do no wrong, so those numbers will be everyone else’s fault.
There should not be one bit of surprise on anyone’s face at his firing of the head of BLS. This is far from the first time Trump has gone on a tear against statistics that “make him look bad.” There is a deep memory hole—to borrow a phrase from Lucian Truscott—that MAGA folk and the media have when it comes to Trump’s conflict with numbers.
In his first term there was the march of thousands of Nazis in Charlotesville that he happily dubbed “very fine people.” There was his first multi-trillion dollar deficit increase. Two impeachments. The number of deaths and injuries by his attempted insurrection. But perhaps the most infamous number is the number of Americans who died with his insane mismanagement of the Covid-19 pandemic.
In March of 2020—in spite of having been recorded by Bob Woodward a few weeks prior that he knew that Covid was dangerous and airborne—he called it a “Democratic hoax.” He refused to allow infected cruise ships to dock because the increased number of cases would “make him look bad.” Sound familiar? Never mind that we were the only country at the time not doing port of entry health checks, so the virus was already in wide circulation.
We would not find out until six months later that Trump was lying through his teeth in March—mainly because Woodward, to his everlasting disgrace, withheld that information so he could use it to promote his book. But as a direct result of his actions and calculated inactions from this period, over 1 million Americans lost their lives. He caused the death of more Americans than all the wars in our history as a nation.
Today Trump labors under the delusion of other numbers: tariffs. He thinks that the “income” generated by tariffs is him making money for the country when the opposite is true. All his is doing is adding to the expenses that each of us have to confront in our daily lives, since we are the ones paying the Trump taxes he thinks are penalties for other countries.
It should not be surprising that Trump hates statistics, especially of the people who died under his watch, who lost jobs and will lose their lives in the future under the inept eye of Robert F. Kennedy Jr.—aptly named Secretary of Health and Human Sacrifice by Jimmy Kimmel. The massive decline in tourism revenue in various local economies is another. Trump’s ICE gestapo has made the idea of being non-American so dangerous that many countries have issued travel advisories to their citizens about visiting the good old USA.
What can be do about this? Lots. The one organization that actually has the power to restrain Trump is Congress. The fact that they have failed to lift a finger only means that we—who also have a duty to protect and defend the Constitution—need to be melting their phone lines to get the point across.
We need to fill in the MAGA memory hole with facts and real numbers by the bulldozer load. Even these people will recall the deaths of relatives or people they knew under his watchless eye the first time around.
Trump needs to be educated on the subject of statistics and consequences. Let’s get to it and send him and his supporters to school, maybe even after-school detention.
Marty Kassowitz is co-founder of Factkeepers. As founder of Interest Factory and View360, he brings more than 30 years experience in effective online communications, social media management, and platform development to the site. He is a writer, designer, editor and long time observer of the ill-logic demonstrated by too many members of the species known as Mankind. After a long history of somewhat private commentary on a subject he totally hates: politics, Marty was encouraged to build this site and put up his own analyses as well as curate relevant content from other sources.
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