Trump’s habit of fudging inconvenient numbers enters dangerous territory
There is a world that President Trump sees when he closes his eyes, and it is to him a better world than this one.
It is a world in which more than half the country consistently views his job performance with approval, though polls understate his approval by 10 or 20 points. Where the only news from Wall Street is when stocks are going up, and one in which voters constantly gush over Trump because their retirement accounts are up by “60, 70, 80, 90 and 100 percent.” Where the jobs numbers under President Barack Obama were horrible and fake and the same numbers during Trump’s presidency a sign of his success. A world in which the proper point at which to measure economic expansion is before taking office and in which bad economic news can be blamed on his possible successor.
As far as facts go, numbers are the stubbornest of things, hard measures of reality. But the thing about numbers is that there are a lot of them, and Trump has learned that sprinkling numbers on top of other numbers can create a mist of uncertainty and, by extension, some political breathing room. He uses numbers the way others use emoji, as approximations of how he feels or he wants you to feel.
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