Trump Math: Really Scary, BIG Numbers

2/10/19: It looks like we’re going to have to deploy the entire U.S. military to defend the border with Mexico. That includes sending the U.S.S. Ronald Reagan steaming up the Rio Grande, even if the river is too shallow for aircraft carriers.

We have to take drastic measures—so send that aircraft carrier plowing up the river at all costs.

President Trump is convinced, based on a hypothetical example in an opinion piece written for the Gallup organization, that we’re about to be overrun by a caravan. A really big caravan! The biggest caravan of rapists and murders and Middle Eastern terrorists with fake Spanish accents, ever!

F-ing BIG!!!!

Sunday morning, the president actually tweeted: “Gallup Poll: ‘Open Borders will potentially attract 42 million Latin Americans.’ This would be a disaster for the U.S. We need the Wall now!”

It may be harder steaming up the Rio Grande; but we need to act quick.

This is the second time in two weeks that the president flipped out after seeing a few scary numbers in the news—that turned out, on second glance, to be way, way less scary. (See his panic in regard to illegal immigrants voting in Texas: 1/29/19; and the much reduced reason for panic, two days later: 1/31/19.)

Looking at this latest tweet, I did what any sensible person would do, assuming a sensible person was seated in the Oval Office and not tweeting stupid crap. I checked the source. Jim Clifton, the CEO of the Gallup organization, wrote an opinion piece based on recent Gallup polling. Researchers, he explained, posed the following question to a sampling of people living in Central America: “Would you like to move to another country permanently if you could?”

Anyway, here’s the terrifying math—assuming you’re too dumb to think for yourself. Mr. Clifton notes that there are 450 million people in Central America. And 27% say they would like to move permanently to a new country.  That means, as the president would have you believe, that 121,500,000 have their bags packed. Of that number who already have their socks and underwear for the trip picked out, 35% said they’d head for the United States.

Forty-three million Latinos heading our way!

When we do Trump Math, we learn that this means 42,525,000 could be heading our way this very afternoon, if not sooner. In fact, I think we should definitely round that number up and make it even scarier!

Call it 43 million on the way!!!

This would make shocking sense, of course, if we took answers to hypothetical questions literally. For example: Would you like to be able to fly? Yes, I would. But that does not mean I am going to jump off a ten story building to see if I can. Would you like to date a super model? I think 97% of bachelors would answer yes—but I am happily married and do not care to answer. That doesn’t all those bachelors are going to be making Saturday night dinner reservations for two.

In terms of scary immigration figures, in the past eight years, three million individuals, total, have been apprehended trying to cross the southern border illegally. That’s about 400,000 per year, slightly less than the 42 (43!) million Trump warns will soon be hammering at our gates.

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THIS IS NOT THE FIRST TIME, of course, that I have been skeptical, shall we say, about Trump Math. My favorite example remains his oft-repeated claim while running for office that there were 93 million Americans out of work. When supporters of President Obama—and also people who understood math—cited an unemployment rate of 5 percent, Trump responded, “The five percent figure is one of the biggest hoaxes in American modern politics.” He would then variously complain that the real unemployment rate was 35% or 42% or 21% or 18% or 24% or some other terrifying number. He could never really make up his mind.

But the number was BIG!!!!!

So let’s try Trump Math. If we believed him in August, 2016 (the last time I can find where he made that the “93 million” claim) and we believe him now when he brags about good monthly job gains, as revealed by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, it is clear the “hoax” is still on!

Get out your calculators, Trump fans, and follow along. If we start in August 2016, we can see the job gains for the last five months of that year: 135,000, 270,000, 128,000, 170,000 and 215,000. That’s 918,000 jobs added, to drop the number of unemployed desperately seeking work to 92,082,000.

Obama, according to Trump, was the worst! Sure, jobs were added for 76 months in a row before Trump took over; but those numbers were “rigged.” Trump numbers? Those were “facts.”

So, 2017: Trump takes over and we see job gains every month, pretty much what we save for the last five years Obama was in charge. Suddenly, President Trump announces the numbers are not rigged. For brevity, here I will total the job gains for the entire year: 2,153,000.

That would leave 89,929,000 Americans still struggling to find work. That’s Trump Math. I just add and subtract.

Yet there was Trump, bragging because the unemployment rate was now only 4.1 percent, which, of course, clearly couldn’t be right.

I mean: study the Trump Math!

Job gains were very strong in 2018; so the bragging continued and the unemployment rate purportedly fell to 3.9 percent; but the Trump Math still didn’t work.

Job figures for December 2018 are preliminary and will not be finalized till the end of this month. In 2018, however, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that 2,674,000 jobs were added to the U.S. economy.

That’s not as good as the economy did in 2014 or 2015, of course, but by Trump Math, all the good numbers under President Obama were “Fake News,” “Fake Addition,” I think he wanted to say.

So here’s the shocking truth—based entirely on Trump Math. Using Candidate Trump’s starting point in August 2016 and subtracting the good job numbers since, and even counting all the extra lawyers the fool has had to hire to keep him out of a Russia-inspired jam, we see the awful truth.

The hoax is the hoax is the hoax. The hoax is still on!

The 3.9 percent figure can’t possibly be right. The number of Americans still desperate for work, by way of Trump Math:

87,255,000.

And that has to be right because Trump said 93 million were unemployed back when he was a humble candidate for the office he now holds.

In fact, I could make up a scary number myself. Based on Trump Math, I could estimate that the unemployment rate is still 37% or 16% or 21% or 99%, because that makes as much sense as what he used to claim.

Trump Math: real unemployment has to be 34.8 percent.

In fact, you can compute the exact rate if you’d like. The Bureau of Labor Statistics pegs the U.S. labor force in 2018 at 163,229,000 and claims—ha, you can’t fool me—that only 6,535,000 are still looking for work.

No way is this liberal falling for that trick. Why, those lying statisticians at the Bureau had the audacity to claim that only 7,565,000 Americans were out of work and the rate of unemployment on the day President Obama stepped down was 4.7%. Well, here’s the Trump Math. If we add the number of Americans in the labor force now and the number that still have to be looking for jobs—arrived at using Trump Math—we realize that the real U.S. labor force numbers 250,484,000.

And that makes the true unemployment rate—and I think someone should notify President Trump to get off his fat ass and do something quick, not just tweet—34.8 percent. I have a calculator, see, and you can’t fool me.

I use Trump Math.