{"id":360076,"date":"2025-12-20T14:26:07","date_gmt":"2025-12-20T14:26:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/360076\/"},"modified":"2025-12-20T14:26:07","modified_gmt":"2025-12-20T14:26:07","slug":"theres-a-92-percent-chance-trump-is-making-it-up","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/360076\/","title":{"rendered":"There\u2019s a 92 Percent Chance Trump Is Making It Up"},"content":{"rendered":"

President Donald Trump likes to use a big number to anchor his point, especially when he wanders off on a tangent. Often it seems that a specific figure is on the tip of his tongue.<\/p>\n

At this year\u2019s ceremonial turkey pardon, Trump praised<\/a> a farmer from Wayne County, North Carolina, for raising two \u201crecord-setting\u201d birds, but then pivoted to his own electoral margin of victory: \u201cI won that county by 92 percent.\u201d (In fact, he won<\/a> it by 16 percentage points.) At a McDonald\u2019s corporate event last month, Trump claimed<\/a> that the United States controls 92 percent of the shoreline of the Gulf of Mexico (the Gulf of America, as he calls it). It\u2019s really<\/a> about<\/a> 46 percent. Trump won the veterans\u2019 vote, he said<\/a> on Veterans Day, with \u201cabout 92 percent or something,\u201d and in July, he said he won farmers<\/a>\u2014well, \u201cby 92 percent.\u201d (More accurate estimates of the portion of the electorate he won would be 65<\/a> percent of veterans and 78<\/a> percent of voters in farming counties, according to exit polls and election data.)<\/p>\n

His fixation on the number between 91 and 93 has been a feature for a while. In April, Trump claimed<\/a> that egg prices had fallen by 92 percent. (The Bureau of Labor Statistics said<\/a> 12.7 percent.) And at a rally shortly before last November\u2019s election, while railing against journalists and the media, he allowed<\/a> that \u201cnot all of them\u201d are \u201csick people.\u201d Just \u201cabout 92 percent.\u201d That one, admittedly, is difficult to fact-check.<\/p>\n

I came upon this curious pattern in the course of tracking down the basis for a far more serious claim the president has made repeatedly as part of his justification for the U.S. military buildup<\/a> near Venezuela. More than two dozen strikes on small boats allegedly carrying drugs in the Caribbean and eastern Pacific have killed<\/a> more than 100 people since September. The strikes have formed the core of the administration\u2019s ongoing campaign to treat President Nicol\u00e1s Maduro as a \u201cnarco-terrorist,\u201d which many view as a veneer<\/a> for wanting to see the Venezuelan strongman ousted from power and work with a new government to secure access to the country\u2019s oil and rare earth minerals.<\/p>\n

Read: Trump knows what he wants, just not how to get there<\/a><\/p>\n

\u201cThe drugs coming in through the sea are down to\u2014they\u2019re down by 92 percent,\u201d Trump told<\/a> Politico on December 8. At a roundtable later the same day, he went<\/a> with \u201c92 or 94 percent.\u201d Three days later: \u201cDrug traffic by sea is down 92 percent,\u201d Trump said<\/a> in the Oval Office. A day after<\/a> that brought a new estimate: \u201cWe knocked out 96 percent of the drugs coming in by water,\u201d he told reporters.<\/p>\n

More often than not, the president links the 92 (or more) percent claim to another: \u201cEvery one of those boats you see get shot down, you just saved 25,000 American lives.\u201d In December alone, he has cited that figure\u201425,000 American lives saved per boat strike\u2014on at least six different occasions.<\/p>\n

I asked the Coast Guard\u2014the lead federal agency for maritime drug interdiction\u2014for any underlying data or information to support both of those figures. The Coast Guard referred me to the Pentagon. The Pentagon referred me to the White House. The Department of Homeland Security referred me to the Pentagon and the White House, which repeated Trump\u2019s remarks without elaboration.<\/p>\n

\u201cPresident Trump is right. It is widely known that one small dose of these drugs is deadly, fentanyl is the number one killer of adults between the ages of 18 and 45, and any boat bringing this poison to our shores has the potential to kill 25,000 Americans or more,\u201d Anna Kelly, a White House spokesperson, told me in a statement. \u201cRather than try to poke holes in these facts, The Atlantic should join President Trump in elevating the voices of families who have lost loved ones to the scourge of narcoterrorism.\u201d<\/p>\n

The president\u2019s claims, however, are so porous that I hardly found anywhere to poke. Although Trump and other<\/a> officials<\/a> have repeatedly<\/a> said<\/a> that the goal of the strikes is to combat the trafficking of illicit fentanyl\u2014the synthetic opioid chiefly responsible for an epidemic of fatal overdoses over the past decade\u2014the drug does not<\/a> come from South America. It enters<\/a> America primarily across the border with Mexico and is produced using precursor chemicals<\/a> from China. Venezuela, however, is primarily a transit country for cocaine bound for Europe.<\/p>\n

In a briefing with lawmakers early last month, top officials acknowledged<\/a> that they believed it was cocaine, not fentanyl, on the boats. A former senior Coast Guard official told me that in his more than three decades in the service, he has not been aware of a single instance of an intercepted load in the Caribbean or eastern Pacific containing fentanyl. In sum, the boats being struck aren\u2019t carrying the drug that is the leading cause of overdose deaths in the U.S.\u2014and what drugs they may be carrying aren\u2019t coming to America. So it is hard to see how each strike saves 25,000 American lives.<\/p>\n

Read: Trump\u2019s boat strikes could make the cartel problem worse<\/a><\/p>\n

Bill Baumgartner, a retired Coast Guard rear admiral who directed the agency\u2019s operations in the Caribbean, told me that number \u201cis just complete and pure fantasy.\u201d The only way to arrive at that total of saved lives is if you would have rounded up 25,000 people and forced them to consume lethal doses of cocaine\u2014a claim \u201cjust as stupid as saying that there\u2019s a box of ammunition; if you confiscate a box of ammunition, you have saved 100 lives because there were 100 bullets there,\u201d Baumgartner said.<\/p>\n

It is even unclear how many of the destroyed vessels were actually carrying narcotics. The administration has not specified<\/a> or released evidence of the types or quantities of drugs on them. When identifying boats ferrying drugs, \u201cthe intelligence isn\u2019t foolproof,\u201d and destroying a vessel with a strike\u2014unlike boarding it during an interdiction\u2014leaves no room to correct faulty intelligence, Baumgartner said. In the 13 months leading up to early October, 21 percent of the boats interdicted off the coast of Venezuela turned out not to be carrying any contraband, according to data shared by Coast Guard Acting Commandant Admiral Kevin Lunday in a letter<\/a> to Senator Rand Paul, a Republican.<\/p>\n

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates<\/a> that in the 12-month period ending in April, there were about 73,690 total drug overdose deaths in the United States (although that number is likely to increase when final data are tallied). If it were the case that each strike since September has saved 25,000 American lives, and given that 28 boats have been destroyed<\/a> to date, the operation would have saved 700,000 lives\u2014more than nine times the total U.S. drug overdose deaths in a year. \u201cThat makes no sense,\u201d Adam Isacson, an expert on drug trafficking in Latin America at WOLA, an NGO based in Washington, D.C., told me.<\/p>\n

The majority of overdose fatalities stem from opioids, not stimulants such as cocaine. In 2023, the most recent year for which such data are available, the CDC tracked<\/a> 29,449 cocaine-linked deaths. (About 1.2 grams of cocaine<\/a> can constitute a fatal dose. That amount is 600 times greater than the 2 milligrams of fentanyl<\/a> that can cause a deadly overdose.) But notably, nearly 70 percent<\/a> of cocaine- and other stimulant-related deaths that year also involved fentanyl.<\/p>\n

As for the basis for the president\u2019s claim of a 92 percent decline in maritime drug traffic: \u201cWe\u2019ve only seen that in Trump\u2019s remarks. No sourcing, no other data,\u201d according to Isacson. (The White House did not specifically respond to my inquiry about it.) But the numbers the government does release give ample reason to doubt the statistic. Last month, the Coast Guard touted<\/a> a record-setting year of drug interdiction; the agency seized more than 510,000 pounds of cocaine, primarily in the Caribbean and eastern Pacific, compared with the 167,000 pounds it seized on average in prior years. This month, as part of its ongoing maritime-law-enforcement operations separate from the strikes, the Coast Guard seized<\/a> 20,000 pounds of cocaine in a single interdiction. But global cocaine supply and demand continue to reach new heights, according to a June report<\/a> from the United Nations. And counternarcotics-enforcement veterans told me that even if drug traffic by sea has seen a sharp drop, that does not signal an overall decline in cocaine traffic, because traffickers adapt<\/a> and reroute<\/a> shipments.<\/p>\n

Perhaps the president has divined these numbers through a mathematically rigorous process beyond the reaches of my imagination. After all, Susie Wiles, the White House chief of staff, told Vanity Fair<\/a> that her boss is a \u201cstatistical savant.\u201d More likely, his affinity for 92 percent and extravagantly large round numbers is what in a game of poker might be called a tell. In 2019, Bloomberg noticed<\/a> 10,000 cropping up whenever Trump made big claims, in topics such as the stock market and ISIS fighters. It was the number Trump cited for known or suspected gang members whom ICE removed in 2018 (though the agency<\/a> put that number at 5,872). And it\u2019s the number of points he said the Dow Jones would<\/a> have been up in 2019 had the Federal Reserve not raised interest rates the previous year.<\/p>\n

Not every time the president cites a 92 percent is off base. His August boast<\/a> of a \u201c92 percent\u201d approval rating for the Department of Veterans Affairs, for instance, was actually slightly less than the 92.8 percent of veterans who reported trusting the VA for their health care in the agency\u2019s survey<\/a> that month. That was up from\u2014wait for it\u201492 percent under the Biden administration the previous year<\/a>. But more often than not, the number seems to serve as a clue that the commander in chief might be reaching for a number he can easily remember, caring little whether it is accurate.<\/p>\n

At three different rallies in the fall of 2024 leading up to Election Day, Trump bragged about his nearly decade-long campaign to denigrate the press. \u201cThe fake news back there\u2014they were at 92 percent approval rating when we started this journey in 2015. And now they\u2019re less than Congress,\u201d he said<\/a> on November 2. \u201cI\u2019m very proud of that.\u201d In fact, the year the president descended his golden escalator and upended the country\u2019s political life, Americans\u2019 trust in the media was not at 92 percent. It stood<\/a> at a then-historic low of 40 percent. In the years since, it has dropped<\/a> to a new historic low of 28 percent. Congress\u2019s approval, for the record, stands<\/a> at 15 percent.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"President Donald Trump likes to use a big number to anchor his point, especially when he wanders off…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":360077,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[18],"tags":[23,3,21,19,22,20,25,24],"class_list":["post-360076","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-united-states","tag-america","tag-news","tag-united-states","tag-united-states-of-america","tag-unitedstates","tag-unitedstatesofamerica","tag-us","tag-usa"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/360076","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=360076"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/360076\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/360077"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=360076"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=360076"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=360076"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}