Much attention has been focused on Donald Trump\u2019s use of words \u2014 that is, his peculiar style of oratory. But more attention should be paid to another feature of his discourse: his use of numbers.<\/p>\n
Trump doesn\u2019t use numbers the way most of us do, as \u201cthings that can be added, subtracted, multiplied, and divided,\u201d as Columbia University statistician Andrew Gelman<\/a> put it. Rather, he uses them as rhetorical objects. <\/p>\n That habit was vividly on display during Trump\u2019s televised speech Wednesday night<\/a>. He claimed that President Biden\u2019s immigration policies had admitted \u201c11,888 murderers.\u201d That his own tariffs and trade deals had brought in \u201c$18 trillion of investment\u201d from abroad. That deals he negotiated with drug companies and foreign countries had \u201cslashed prices on drugs and pharmaceuticals by as much as 400, 500 and even 600 percent.\u201d <\/p>\n These are numbers that don\u2019t make a lot of sense but they kinda sound good.<\/p>\n \u2014 Statistician Andrew Gelman<\/p>\n I asked the White House for its sources for these figures, but didn\u2019t receive a reply. <\/p>\n The exploitation of big or vague statistics to make a partisan point isn\u2019t novel. It was perfected in the 1950s by Sen. Joseph McCarthy, whose claim about the number of communists in the State Department shifted from 57 to 205 to 81 to 207 in speeches to varied audiences. <\/p>\n Get the latest from Michael Hiltzik <\/p>\n McCarthy didn\u2019t actually have a \u201clist\u201d of reds, as he claimed \u2014 his goal was to communicate that there were lots of them, the specific number unimportant. <\/p>\n I reported recently<\/a> on implausible statistics coming from the Trump administration about healthcare, mortgages and inflation. But there are many more cases to draw our attention. Therefore, it\u2019s proper to examine the underlying political strategy, such as it is. <\/p>\n First, some examples: In his recent interview with Politico<\/a>, Trump asserted that \u201cWe save 25,000 people every time we knock out a boat.\u201d (Politico\u2019s interviewer, Dasha Burns, didn\u2019t press Trump to explain his math; the White House didn\u2019t respond to my request for validation.) <\/p>\n On Trump\u2019s 100th day in office, Atty. Gen. Pam Bondi declared that day, April 29, National Fentanyl Awareness Day<\/a>. She announced that since Trump\u2019s inauguration \u201cwe\u2019ve seized over 22 million fentanyl-laced pills, saving over 119 million lives<\/a>.\u201d That works out to nearly 1 in every 3 Americans<\/a>. Alerted to the absurdity of the claim, she revised it \u2014 to having saved 258 million lives<\/a>. That would mean 75% of the entire U.S. population rescued from fentanyl-driven oblivion.<\/p>\n Bondi derived her figures from a calculation by the Drug Enforcement Administration, a unit of her agency, that 22 million pills was the equivalent of 119 million fatal doses. But as Ryan Marino of Case Western Reserve University told Poynter.org, her original claim assumed that every pill would be shared by five users, and that all would have died of an overdose \u2014 if not for the administration\u2019s intervention.<\/p>\n Bondi\u2019s audience was \u201cthe distressingly large percentage of the public that is incapable of the most rudimentary statistical reasoning,\u201d by whom \u201cBondi intended that her message be taken as a literal statement of fact,\u201d writes Paul Campos of the University of Colorado Law School. Among her goals was \u201cto undermine the very concept of some sort of reliable public discourse, especially one emanating from purportedly authoritative government sources.\u201d<\/p>\n Innumeracy is not exclusively an American issue. The inability to comprehend the significance of big numbers is a human affliction. No one is especially enamored of arithmetic, except perhaps mathematicians (and, also, me).<\/p>\n Large magnitudes tax our imagination. \u201cBig numbers befuddle us<\/a>, and our lack of comprehension compromises our ability to judge information about government budgets, scientific findings, the economy and other topics that convey meaning with abstract figures, like millions, billions and trillions,\u201d the Wall Street Journal observed in 2017. \u201cYet humongous numbers pepper the news, and as citizens, we are asked to make sense of the material.\u201d<\/p>\n Metrics to aid comprehension abound. Would it help, for example, to know that one million seconds is about 11 and a half days<\/a>, one billion seconds is 3,200 years, and one trillion seconds is about 32,000 years? <\/p>\n Gelman divides innumeracy into two categories. The first is \u201cstandard-issue innumeracy,\u201d which he identifies as \u201cclaims that could in theory be correct but whose plausibility disintegrates after any serious engagement with reality … These are numbers that don\u2019t make a lot of sense, but they kinda sound good.\u201d <\/p>\n Gelman\u2019s examples<\/a> include a claim offered in the book \u201cFreakonomics\u201d that \u201cbeautiful parents are 36% more likely to have girl babies,\u201d derived from a tortuous calculation by a British statistician<\/a>. <\/p>\n My own favorite case<\/a> involved the claim by a couple of documentary producers in 2005 that the porn movie \u201cDeep Throat,\u201d having grossed $600 million in its time, was the most profitable picture ever made. My calculations established that for this to be true, \u201cDeep Throat\u201d would have had to sell tickets to enough customers to populate the entire United States one and a half times over.<\/p>\n Gelman\u2019s second category is \u201chard-core innumeracy,\u201d or \u201cquantitative statements that don\u2019t even require a moment\u2019s reflection to recognize as absolutely ridiculous.\u201d The features of this affliction are \u201cproviding numbers that are orders of magnitude away from anything reasonable\u201d and \u201cexercising political or social authority, the power to say things that don\u2019t make sense without getting called on it.\u201d<\/p>\n That\u2019s the pigeonhole where one finds Trump\u2019s 25,000-lives-saved trope. It also houses Trump\u2019s claims about immigrant murderers, trillions in tariff-driven foreign investments and drug prices and Bondi\u2019s fentanyl claim.<\/p>\n Let\u2019s try to deconstruct some of these statistics. <\/p>\n Start with his \u201c11,888 murderers\u201d among the illegal immigrants admitted under Biden. Trump has used this figure, or similar claims, at least since his 2024 presidential campaign. As it happens, Trump\u2019s figure shifted over time \u2014 in two posts on his Truth Social platform on the same day, he used 13,000 and 14,000<\/a>. The closest thing to a source for the figure is a letter provided by the Department of Homeland Security<\/a> to Rep. Tony Gonzales (R-Texas) in September 2024. The letter stated that 13,099 \u201cnoncitizens\u201d convicted of homicide were \u201cnon-detained\u201d by the agency. <\/p>\n But neither the idea that all of these murderers are roaming the country in freedom nor that they were admitted under Biden is true. DHS says only that it is not the detaining agency \u2014 they\u2019re likely to be in the custody of state or other federal agencies. Moreover, the figure in the letter covers decades of immigrant admissions, including during Trump\u2019s first term. <\/p>\n \u201cThe data goes back decades; it includes individuals who entered the country over the past 40 years or more, the vast majority of whose custody determination was made long before this Administration,\u201d DHS stated in a follow-up announcement<\/a>. \u201cIt also includes many who are under the jurisdiction or currently incarcerated by federal, state or local law enforcement partners.\u201d<\/p>\n As for Trump\u2019s claim that more than 50% of these murderers had killed more than one person, its source is unknown.<\/p>\n Trump\u2019s assertion that he has secured \u201c$18 trillion of investment into the United States\u201d from abroad through his tariffs and trade deals is murky, but still implausible. The White House website claims only $9.6 trillion<\/a> in \u201ctotal U.S. and foreign investments\u201d announced during his current term. A Bloomberg analysis pared that figure back to $7 trillion, including \u201camorphous pledges\u201d from overseas, not concrete commitments. <\/p>\n How much money has come specifically from tariffs? The administration itself announced Tuesday that it has collected $200 billion<\/a> from \u201ctariff enforcement\u201d since Trump\u2019s inauguration. That\u2019s a lot, but it shouldn\u2019t be forgotten that for the most part, tariffs are paid by U.S. consumers through higher prices for affected goods. <\/p>\n Trump in November promised to issue $2,000 in \u201cdividend checks\u201d<\/a> to all Americans other than \u201chigh-income people,\u201d to be funded from tariff revenues. Trump didn\u2019t specify where the income cutoff would be, but the budget hawks at the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget calculated that if the same standard as that governing the pandemic-era economic impact payments was used, the cost would be about $600 billion<\/a>, swamping tariff income. <\/p>\n It\u2019s almost tempting to call all these assertions \u201cwhoppers,\u201d but that hardly does justice to the sheer audacity of Trump\u2019s number-mongering. Yet, again, his goal is not to provide numbers to be added, subtracted, multiplied and divided, but to shower his audience with numbers big enough to make their eyes glaze over.<\/p>\n As Gelman observes, the problem with this approach as policy \u201cis not just the innumeracy, it\u2019s the blithe disregard for it, the idea that being off by multiple orders of magnitude … just doesn\u2019t matter.\u201d The Trump tradition is to dismiss hard information as \u201cfake news\u201d or \u201calternative facts,\u201d and hope that voters will just go along. <\/p>\n Stay tuned, because Trump\u2019s numbers are likely to get ever more preposterous. But actual math can be a harsh mistress, and it may not be long before the absurdity of Trump\u2019s version becomes obvious to everyone.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Much attention has been focused on Donald Trump\u2019s use of words \u2014 that is, his peculiar style of…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":101130,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[52881,8863,55040,30201,55042,55043,48,52,51,1838,47,50,49,55041,212,2301,13967,315,1519,1695,55044],"class_list":["post-101129","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-los-angeles","tag-bondi","tag-claim","tag-figure","tag-foreign-country","tag-gelman","tag-innumeracy","tag-la","tag-la-headlines","tag-la-news","tag-letter","tag-los-angeles","tag-los-angeles-headlines","tag-los-angeles-news","tag-murderer","tag-number","tag-president-biden","tag-tariff","tag-time","tag-trump","tag-trump-administration","tag-varied-audience"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/101129","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=101129"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/101129\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/101130"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=101129"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=101129"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=101129"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}