I’m historically shitty at math. The only exception is my freakish ability to quickly calculate how much I have to pay when Dillard’s has shoes at 65 percent off. But you know who’s even worse at math than I am? That’s right. Donald Jedediah Trump. Pretty sure Trump couldn’t even do my shoe-sale math much less weigh earning points on the store credit card vs. cashback on the Costco card. Ima need a likker drink doing all that math is all I’m saying.
But Trump? He’s so bad at math he makes me look like Archimedes. Especially since I’ve got that whole J.D. Vance post-menopausal girl beard thing going on.
Trump just can’t do numbers. Let me give you an example. Last week’s livestream on X featuring Trump bro-ing it out with Snow Queen Elon Musk reportedly attracted 1.3 million viewers at its peak.
Trump must’ve thought the 1.3 million number sounded a bit anemic, so he came up with something exponentially more impressive: “60 million.”
Mmmkay. That’s only off by, let’s see, naught from naught leaves naught, carry the 1, approximately 58.7 million. So close.
Trump is just not a numbers guy, despite his Wharton education where his GPA was, in Trumpspeak, “4.0 Bazillion.” And, no, I realize there is no “bazillion” unit of measurement but it’s not like he can hold up his hands and say “this many” like a toddler. Pity.
It’s a rare moment when I feel kinship with Trump, but I can relate to being a math dumbass. He apparently thinks all numbers (with the exception of weight, which I totally agree with) should be huge even if they aren’t. Therefore, a crowd of supporters at one of his rallies is described as “tens of thousands” by impartial observers but Trump proclaims it was “really hundreds of thousands.”
Not many people seemed to pay attention to Trump when, during the 2020 election, he announced that if he thinks something is true in his mind, then it is true.
That was a huge turning point in my understanding of the man. Truth is what you think inside your own head and has nuttin’ to do with facts. So, a crowd of 20,000 becomes 200,000 if that’s the number you have inside your noggin’ rattling around in there with old pictures of Stormy Daniels and a search history for “How People Not Me But Other People Can Make Their Hands Appear Larger.”
This “truth is what I think it is” is scary to sensible folk. Manipulating numbers because you don’t respect their integrity is also scary. Trump recently claimed more people attended his rally on Jan. 6, 2021, than attended the March on Washington in 1963 in which Martin Luther King Jr. gave his famous “I Have A Dream” speech. Well, no. Dr. King’s speech drew 250,000 people while Trump’s speech drew 53,000.
Told this, Trump repeated his belief, refusing to acknowledge the huge math gap. That’s scary. Maybe not as scary as a question that begins “Two trains leave different cities heading towards each other at different speeds…” But, yeah. Pretty damn scary.