Donald Trumps Never-Ending War on Numbers – The New Republic

At a public appearance in Pennsylvania last week, President Donald Trump offered some fresh insight into how he views coronavirus testing. The country is still struggling to test for the virus at scale, which in turn is hampering our ability to return to anything resembling normal life before the pandemic. To the president, however, the testing itself is the problem. When you test, you have a case, Trump said. When you test, you find something is wrong with people. If we didnt do any testing, we would have very few cases.

His claim drew the scorn of epidemiologists and anyone with a passing familiarity with infectious diseases. At the same time, it offered a useful window into how the president understands the world around him. After all, theres a certain logic of sorts to his approach. Testing is the only way to conclusively determine how many coronavirus cases are currently out there. The goal, both for public health and public relations, is to have as few cases as possible. If theres no testing, then there are no cases. And if there are no cases, then there is no crisis.

This is a bewildering approach to a public health disaster, to say the least. But it is an unsurprising one for Trump. In his world, there are Good Numbers and Bad Numbers. As president he wants to take credit for all sorts of Good Numbers: rises in the stock market, declines in unemployment, upticks in approval ratings, and so on. At the same time, he disputes and rejects any Bad Numbers that might come his way. He spent his entire adult life working in the private sector, where companies and fortunes can live or die based on numbers on sheets of paper. Numbers form an intrinsic part of how he measures his own success and the success of others.

Trump is hardly the only figure in American politics to approach numbers with something less than scholarly detachment. Every president wants to tout their accomplishments and minimize their shortcomings, especially when numbers are involved. What sets Trump apart is both the talismanic nature with which he wields these numbers and his perpetual willingness to manipulate them to his own ends. All of those numbers are both the greatest possible source of personal validationand the most dangerous threat to it.

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Donald Trumps Never-Ending War on Numbers - The New Republic