Donald Trump's War on Numbers
It’s one thing to cheat egregiously and then loudly, repeatedly, and insistently insist that the other side is cheating and must be punished. That’s been Donald Trump’s modus operandi from the very beginning. He learned everything from Roy Cohn, the worst person in the world for decades. Then Cohn died, and Trump inherited that title.
Cohn taught Trump to always go on the offensive. He drilled into Trump’s brain that a man should never apologize or accept responsibility for his mistakes when they can be blamed on his enemies.
Trump is a notorious cheater at golf, which wouldn’t matter so much if he weren’t also a cheater in every other aspect of life.
It’s one thing to accuse your enemy of cheating. It’s quite another to fire the referee on the basis that they’re unethical scum who have been paid off by the other team to rig the game.
In his first term, Trump seemed content to cheat egregiously while accusing the other side of cheating. In his second term, he is pursuing a much more aggressive course of action because he has lost what was left of his mind, and there are no adults in the administration to restrain him from doing whatever he wants.
This time around, he’s firing the referee with the insolence and audacity to tell him that he’s losing when he feels strongly that he’s not only winning decisively, but doing so on a historic, unprecedented scale.
That’s what happened when Trump fired Erika McEntarfer, who previously served as Commissioner of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, after the release of a weaker-than-expected July jobs report.
Rather than concede that the economy was struggling, Trump angrily insisted, with his trademark complete lack of evidence, that the numbers were “rigged in order to make the Republicans, and ME, look bad.”
Trump is a firm believer in killing the messenger, because if a messenger delivers news that displeases you, he’s clearly a radical left Marxist pawn of SOROS, Sleepy Joe, Slopadopolis, and behind the Russia, Russia, Russia hoax and the “laptop from hell.”
Incidentally, just by writing in Trump’s style, I can feel myself growing dumber and dumber.
If the numbers don’t say what Trump wants them to say, then he rejects them as phony, fake, rigged, and the product of a massive leftwing conspiracy to depict a perfect administration that does everything right and is the envy of the world, as somehow deeply flawed.
When statistics illustrated soundly that crime was down in Washington, D.C., and other Democrat-run cities, Trump simply insisted that the numbers were the product of Trump-haters cursed with Trump Derangement Syndrome.
Trump is enraged by statisticians who are not precise and meticulous in their work and do not share his conviction that D.C. was the most dangerous, deadly city in the world before he sent in the National Guard and the safest city in the world now that the streets are filled with bored men in uniform with guns and nothing to do.
Trump insisted that all of the statistics proving him very wrong were rigged, wrong, and a Marxist plot, but he also pointed to anecdotal evidence that he was saving our country.
He’d gush about how some sycophant had told him that his family was terrified of going out to eat downtown because they were worried that their families would be beheaded by scary foreigners on drugs who are also trans and Muslim and Antifa/Black Lives Matter but now they can eat in peace now that Trump has saved the city the way he saved the country and the world.
If crime were really down, would DOGE douchebag Big Balls have gotten carjacked? Checkmate, libs!
If a number flatters or pleases Trump, then it is by definition true. If it displeases him, then it is, by definition, fake news, phony, rigged, or the product of a hoax.
Most recently, Trump and seemingly everyone on the right agreed that political violence was overwhelmingly, if not exclusively, caused by radical far-left Marxists who are part of a vast domestic terror network.
Unfortunately, a June 2024 study on domestic extremism by the National Institute of Justice, a research agency under the DOJ’s Office of Justice Programs, countered this assertion. It contained damning passages like, “the number of far-right attacks continues to outpace all other types of terrorism and domestic violent extremism,” and “Since 1990, far-right extremists have committed far more ideologically motivated homicides than far-left or radical Islamist extremists.”
Rather than acknowledge the truth or legitimacy of the government report, the Trump administration had it deleted. If you
For Trump, it’s not enough to accuse the other side of cheating, fire the referee, and change the scoreboard to reflect his firm belief that he’s always winning by a historic landslide (like he did in the 2020 elections).
The next step involves suing or arresting the referee for crimes against humanity or electoral interference on the grounds that hurting Trump’s feelings is a crime against him, and by extension, the country that he rules with a perfection historians never thought possible.