Dwain Northey (Gen X)

Donald Trump has a very special relationship with numbers: if they flatter him, they’re gospel truth carved into the Mount Rushmore of statistics; if they don’t, they’re fake, rigged, or obviously the product of a deep-state calculator conspiracy. He’s the only man who could look at a grim chart and see a personal attack. During COVID, when cases skyrocketed, he hit upon what he considered a stroke of genius: stop testing. Voilà — no more cases! Sure, it’s the epidemiological equivalent of closing your eyes during a horror movie and declaring the monster gone, but in Donnie’s world, it was a masterstroke.

And if that logic works for pandemics, why stop there? Following Trump’s scientific method, if we stopped doing pregnancy tests, there’d be no more pregnancies. No pregnancies, no abortions — problem solved! Somebody alert the Nobel Committee for Medicine; we’ve found the cure for reproductive rights debates. In fact, why not just stop weighing ourselves? Instant weight loss! Stop counting money, and everyone’s a billionaire. Stop recording poll numbers, and he’s automatically the most popular president in history.

But unfortunately for Dear Leader, some numbers stubbornly refuse to obey the will of his spray-tanned majesty. Economic data, for instance, is looking less “golden tower” and more “Atlantic City bankruptcy.” Jobs reports aren’t hitting his self-declared “historic highs,” inflation is a little too real for comfort, and GDP growth doesn’t seem to care about his press releases. And when reality doesn’t bend, there’s always the next best thing: firing the person in charge of the inconvenient numbers.

So who’s on the chopping block next? We’ve already seen the Bureau of Labor Statistics commissioner mysteriously “retire” after reporting less-than-stellar employment numbers. Maybe the head of the Census Bureau will mysteriously “resign” for reporting actual population counts. Or perhaps the entire Congressional Budget Office will be gutted for the crime of doing math without a MAGA-approved filter. Frankly, the safest government job right now might be White House landscaper — as long as you don’t trim the Rose Garden hedge into the shape of a downward-sloping graph.

In Trump’s utopia, every chart goes up, every number is perfect, and the math always proves him right — because if it doesn’t, the math gets fired. Who needs reality when you’ve got the power to erase it with a Sharpie and a tantrum?