How Trump gets away with using dubious figures

Much attention has been focused on Donald Trump’s use of words — that is, his peculiar style of oratory.

- MICHAEL HILTZIK

A CHART is shown as President Trump speaks this month in Mount Pocono, Pa.

(ALEX BRANDON Associated Press)

But more attention should be paid to another feature of his discourse: his use of numbers.

Trump doesn’t use numbers the way most of us do, as “things that can be added, subtracted, multiplied, and divided,” as Columbia University statistician Andrew Gelman put it. Rather, he uses them as rhetorical objects.

That habit was vividly on display during Trump’s televised speech Wednesday night. He claimed that President Biden's immigration policies had admitted “11,888 murderers.” That his own tariffs and trade deals had brought in “$18 trillion of investment” from abroad. That deals he negotiated with drug companies and foreign countries had “slashed prices on drugs and pharmaceuticals by as much as 400, 500 and even 600%.”

I asked the White House for its sources for these figures, but didn’t receive a reply.

The exploitation of big or vague statistics to make a partisan point isn’t 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.

McCarthy didn’t actually have a “list” of reds, as he claimed — his goal was to communicate that there were lots of them, the specific number unimportant.

I reported recently 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’s proper to examine the underlying political strategy, such as it is.