Donald Trump, ‘numbers’ guy

The day Donald Trump announced his 2016 presidential candidacy at Trump Tower, I was tasked with evaluating the factual claims he made in his speech. I did so … for the first couple of inaccurate claims he presented. Then I cut to the chase.

”This is the whole thing about fact-checking Donald Trump: He is un-fact-checkable,” I wrote. “That’s his gift and his angle.”

At the time, this was an observation offered about a man that everyone knew was not a serious contender for the presidency. That he invented numbers and embraced numbers invented by others was of no more consequence, it seemed, than the ramblings of a conspiracy theorist outside the White House are consequential to the decisions in the Oval Office.

Then voters invited the guy with the conspiracy theories to make the Oval Office his workplace. Twice.

The first time they did so, Trump spent four years trying to fend off reality. He’d built a robust base of support by telling Americans what he thought they wanted to hear, and some did. Fact-checkers scrambled to point out that a lot of what he offered was contrived or imaginary, but he simply declared that the fact-checkers were the dishonest ones. For people invested in agreeing with Trump, it was easier to believe that someone they’d never heard of was a liar than was the president who’s promised them the world. Or, if not the world, then at least making their enemies suffer worse than they were.

When he came back to the White House in January, the situation was different. The artificial universe he’d helped construct wasn’t a political aberration; it had devoured nearly the entire political right. What little opposition he’d faced from his own party in 2017 was gone, just as he felt sufficiently confident and resentful to wield the power of the presidency however he saw fit. Who was going to stop him, Mike Johnson? Samuel Alito? Be real.

On Monday, Trump deployed this new approach on two subtly connected fronts. He announced that his administration would take over law enforcement in D.C., ostensibly because it was demanded by a level of crime that constituted an emergency. He also nominated a Heritage Foundation apparatchik to run the Bureau of Labor Statistics, having fired the sitting director ostensibly because she’d overseen the release of biased or unfair jobs numbers.

As you are likely aware, neither of those pretexts is legitimate. Crime is down in D.C., not up. The jobs data produced by the BLS is reliable — in part because it includes revisions that are a form of self-correction. So while it is true that there is crime in D.C. and it is true that the jobs numbers aren’t perfect, Trump took extraordinary (and alarming) actions after exaggerating and misrepresenting both of those issues.

What’s important here is that the numbers don’t matter. It didn’t matter that crime was down in D.C.; Trump and his team simply cherry-picked metrics and amplified skepticism to provide cover for what Trump had wanted to do since 2020. It didn’t matter that the BLS is reliable; the numbers weren’t good so, with his base trained to treat bad news as fake news, change was needed. And reality got blurry.

What’s different about this moment relative to his false claims in 2015 or 2017 is that Trump is empowered and willing to deploy the federal government against objectivity. His intelligence apparatus is spreading false claims about the origins of the Russia investigation. His Health secretary is explicitly rejecting scientific expertise in favor of doing one’s own (non-scientific) research. And, if his nominee is confirmed, the BLS measures of the economy will be withheld or dubious. His economic team has already spent months making false claims about trade, tariffs and international deals. Why not make the jobs numbers say what Trump wants, too?

After Trump’s announcement about D.C., a lot of people noted the conflict between his pro-cop, anti-crime rhetoric and his coddling of the rioters who assaulted police on Jan. 6, 2021. That riot, though, was the culmination of another effort by Trump to supplant reality with cherry-picked, contrived data: his insistence that the 2020 election had been stolen. The post-2020 period, more than his first term itself, established Trump’s second-term modus operandi. Evidence that he was wrong was ignored and countervailing evidence, however dubious, was offered in its stead. And it worked; as late as last year most Republicans thought the election was somehow stolen.

It has long been the case — since his first day as a candidate, if not before — that challenging Trump with facts is fruitless. It’s still important to point out that crime is down and the jobs data is valid, even if we know that the people who will accept Trump’s assertions about those issues won’t accept our own. What’s different now is the extent to which Trump uses data as a tool against reality, forming arguments that get propped up with numbers his side invented or isolated and in service of which contradictory figures are sent to rhetorical purgatory.

And that he has now enlisted the federal government in this effort.

Photo: Official White House photo by Abe McNatt. (Flickr)