IF THERE’S ONE THING DONALD TRUMP HATES—and there isn’t just one thing, there are lots of them—it’s unfavorable statistics. That’s why he was so bent out of shape when the Bureau of Labor Statistics had the audacity to report lower-than-anticipated job numbers, prompting him to fire its commissioner, Erika McEntarfer.
“We need accurate Jobs Numbers,” Trump declared on Truth Social, explaining his decision to terminate “this Biden Political Appointee.” (He neglected to mention that McEntarfer was confirmed with broad bipartisan support, including from then–Ohio Senator JD Vance.) “She will be replaced with someone much more competent and qualified. Important numbers like this must be fair and accurate, they can’t be manipulated for political purposes.”
Yes, the last thing in the world Donald Trump wants is for politics to find its way into the day-to-day workings of his administration. He insisted the reported numbers, which were revised to show that hiring had slowed significantly over the past three months, were fabricated to hurt him. “No one can be that wrong?” he posted, incredulously. Whomever Trump taps to replace McEntarfer, it is safe to say, will not be permitted to use these numbers again. The president who pressured Georgia’s secretary of state to “find 11,780 votes” to overturn the state’s 2020 election result is not going to stand for having a member of his own government get away with dispensing accurate information.
The White House is now said to be searching for someone with “tremendous credibility and experience” to replace McEntarfer. It will certainly be someone who can concoct numbers showing, as Trump put it, that “The Economy is BOOMING under ‘TRUMP,’” because that’s what he, Trump, believes.
TRUMP AND NUMBERS GO WAY BACK. Throughout his life, Trump has insisted that Trump got his start in business with “a small loan of $1 million” from Trump’s dad, who was also named Trump. But in 2018, the New York Times reported that the actual amount of financial assistance that Donald Trump got from Fred Trump was at least $413 million, much of it through creative tax dodges.
Clearly, the Times was off by $412 million. No wonder it’s failing.
In February 2017, soon after Trump took office for Trump’s first incredible and amazing term, Trump declared, “The murder rate in our country is the highest it’s been in 47 years.” In fact, while by that point the murder rate had increased slightly over the prior two years, it was still around half of what it had been in 1980. But who are we to go against Trump’s snap hunch? Indeed, a closer look at the numbers shows the president is right: 2017 minus 47 is 1970, which is 1980 minus 10. This means that no one can say for sure what the murder rate was in any given year.
Trump also famously said the crowd at his 2017 inauguration “looked like a million, a million and a half people”; his White House press secretary, Sean Spicer, went with this flow, claiming it was the “largest audience to ever witness an inauguration, period.” However, others claimed—based solely on things like “photographic evidence”—that the total was much lower, perhaps a third of the 1.8 million who attended Barack Obama’s first inauguration.
The press pounced, yet both statements are arguably true: Perhaps the crowd did look to Trump like it was well more than a million. Spicer’s comment, meanwhile, was quickly explained away by Trump senior adviser Kellyanne Conway as an example of “alternative facts.” When NBC’s Chuck Todd pointed out that “Alternative facts aren’t facts, they are falsehoods” and asked why the president and his spokesperson were not telling the truth, Conway snapped, “Your job is not to call things ridiculous that are said by our press secretary and our president. That’s not your job.”
This pretty much set the tone for Trump’s entire first term. But now, in his second turn as president, Trump’s gift for the magical and creative use of numbers is more glaringly apparent.
TO LIST ALL OF THE STATISTICS-ASSISTED LIES Trump has told over the years could fill a library. But for our purposes, we can pick a few examples to show the methods he’s mastered.
To start, there is simple multiplication.
At a cabinet meeting in late February, Trump restated a figure he has used before: “We lose 300,000 people a year to fentanyl.” That is more than five times the actual number of reported deaths for the most recent twelve-month period for which statistics were then available.
On March 4, while addressing a joint session of Congress, Trump claimed that, during the Biden administration, “21 million people poured into the United States” from other countries, which is roughly twice the tally of 10.8 million arrests (not people) recorded during that time. Talking to reporters later that month, he asserted that the United States had a $1 trillion trade deficit with China, or roughly four times the actual deficit.
Trump also excels at what professional statisticians often refer to as “just making shit up.” For instance, he has asserted that official government records show that some 4.7 million people aged 100–109 are collecting Social Security, along with 3.6 million beneficiaries aged 110–119, and 3.47 million aged 120–129, 3.5 million aged 140 to 149, and 1.3 million 150 to 159. After age 160, by his account, the number of people raking in this largesse dropped to 130,000.
As has been pointed out, this is a simple but longstanding clerical issue that does not reflect actual payments to real people. The distinction is of no significance to Trump, who at all times remains true to his convictions, even imaginary ones.
Now Trump is taking a victory lap on the economy, claiming that, in just a few short months, his administration has ended inflation.
In April 2025, Trump posted on social media that there is “virtually No Inflation” and that consumer costs are “trending so nicely downward.” In May, he virtually lost the “virtually,” and posted that there was now, in fact, “NO INFLATION.” The statement is true—if, by “no inflation,” Trump meant an inflation rate of 2.3 percent, which is what we had in April; by June, it had risen to 2.7 percent. Both figures are above the Federal Reserve’s target of 2 percent inflation annually. While this is technically not no inflation, the fact remains that Trump could always fire the deep staters who point this out.
In a July 22 speech to Republican members of Congress, Trump made a number of specific claims about inflation and the economy. He reported gas prices of “$1.99 a gallon today in five different states;” the actual number of gas stations in the United States for which this was true was zero. He said the cost of groceries was down, which was true for the month of April and false only for every other month this year. That sort of thing.
But Trump’s swami-like skill at conjuring up statistics has never been demonstrated in a more dazzling way than in his pronouncements on pharmaceutical prices. Speaking with reporters Sunday on the tarmac of Lehigh Valley International Airport in Pennsylvania, Trump was asked, “What advice do you have for Republicans on Capitol Hill heading into midterms?” Here is his response:
One of the things they’re going to be talking about pretty soon are [sic] the tremendous drop in drug prices. You know, we’ve cut drug prices by 1,200, 1,300, 1,400, 1,500 percent. I don’t mean 50 percent. I mean fourteen, fifteen hundred percent, because we’re going favored nations, we want the same price as Europe gets. We want the same prices other country [sic] gets. Over the years—25, 30 years ago—it started where they were charging us much more. I put an end to it, you know, with a letter that you saw last week. So I think that’s going to be a point. I don’t know how anybody could win an election if they’re on the other side of that issue. So we’ll be dropping drug prices. It’ll start over the next two to three months, by 1,200 1,300, and even 1,400 percent—and 500 percent, but not just 50 percent or 25 percent, which normally would be a lot, because the rest of the world pays much less for the identical drug. And we’re going to be paying the same thing. We’re going to have a favored nations. We will pay as low as the lowest nation in the world.
It should be noted, first of all, that not one reporter dared to point out that a reduction of 100 percent means at no cost at all, and a reduction of 1,200, 1,300, 1,400, and 1,500 is mathematically impossible. It’s also worth noting that Trump’s apparent lack of understanding about how percentages work has been pointed out and lampooned by Stephen Colbert of the Late Show and Josh Johnson of the Daily Show, presumably among others.
Trump doesn’t care. He just picks the numbers he wants and rolls with them. They always back up what he says. They always will. The chances of his being right are always way more than 1,000 percent.