The Art of the Lie

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In Donald Trump’s very first speech announcing his candidacy for the White House, he included the assertion that “the real unemployment rate is anywhere from 18 to 20 percent.” The official rate calculated by the Bureau of Labor Statistics at that time, however, was just 5.5 percent.

There are different ways of measuring the health of the economy, but Trump’s repeated claims about unemployment on the campaign trail were not even remotely plausible. At one point, he declared it was as high as 42 percent. Accuracy wasn’t the point. Instead, he sought to sow confusion by insisting the official data were “totally fiction” or “phony.”

Accuracy wasn’t the point. Instead, Trump sought to sow confusion by insisting the official data were “totally fiction” or “phony.”

His tune changed once he got into office. He’s now known to tweet about the monthly jobs report released by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. “Excellent Jobs Numbers just released—and I have only just begun,” he tweeted in August, when the unemployment rate was reported at 4.3 percent. These numbers are no longer phony now that they serve his ends.

“If certain facts are useful to the administration, they’ll tout them. If they’re not, they’ll not only ignore them, they’ll accuse them of being fake,” Jared Bernstein, senior fellow at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities and former chief economic adviser to Vice President Joe Biden, writes in an email to The Progressive. “Yes, this is crass opportunism, but it also implicitly signals that facts don’t matter.”

Trump’s ongoing ease with lying has been well documented. He’s been caught in so many mistruths that The New York Times and The Washington Post are keeping running lists.

It’s one thing when Trump oversells how much his brand is worth or soft-pedals the failure of his casinos. But his lies about economic data have a particularly damaging effect. His steady habit of falsifying cold, hard economic facts has led to a mass distrust in reality and an atrophied policy debate.

Trump has claimed so often that the United States is the highest-taxed country in the world that it’s hard to keep count. CNN says it’s been at least twenty times, so frequently that it twice ran virtually the same headline debunking this claim: “Trump says the U.S. is the highest taxed country in the world. No, it’s not.”

The United States collects less in tax revenue per capita than other developed peers like Luxembourg and Norway. Rich Americans, even those in high-tax states, still don’t pay as much as, say, their counterparts in Denmark. Even our corporate tax rate, which until the Republican tax bill passed was 38.9 percent, was just the fourth highest in the world.

Trump was casual with other economic data on the campaign trail. He promised to increase annual gross domestic product (GDP) growth to 6 percent. The economy hasn’t grown at a more than 5 percent annual rate since 1984, and has averaged less than 3 percent since 2005.

Supercharged growth has so far failed to materialize now that he’s in office. But Trump is not going to admit defeat. In August, he boasted about a report showing quarterly GDP growth of 3 percent by claiming it was annual—even though one quarter’s high GDP growth is often offset by another quarter’s lower level. He even used his false interpretation as a cudgel against President Obama, despite the fact that quarterly GDP growth rose to above 3 percent eight times under his predecessor.

Trump went from misinterpreting GDP data to messing around with how it’s used. All Presidents fashion budgets and release cheery forecasts of how much the economy would grow if their wish lists were implemented. But Trump tasked his team with doing it backward. He asked White House economic advisers to start with the GDP growth he wants to see—between 3 and 3.5 percent annually—and then backfill their models to get there. That’s a dangerous way to use numbers.

But playing fast and loose with numbers comes easily to Trump. He’s done it all his life.

Of all the people who have made it onto Forbes’s 400 richest Americans, “not one has been more fixated with his or her net worth estimate on a year-in, year-out basis than Donald J. Trump,” the magazine reported, describing his attempts to badger it to raise his value.

As far back as 1988, Trump got an accounting firm to declare he was worth $700 million when, in fact, he was $20 million in the red. He claimed to be worth $10 billion when he launched his bid for President, even though Bloomberg and Forbes put it closer to $3 billion to $4.5 billion.

Trump’s self-evaluations changed depending on what most benefited him.

His estimates could fluctuate wildly within the span of a single day. “He told me that his net worth was $4 billion to $5 billion,” journalist Tim O’Brien wrote in 2005. “Then, later that same day . . . he said his casino holdings represented 2 percent of his wealth, which at the time gave him a net worth of about $1.7 billion.”

Trump’s self-evaluations changed depending on what most benefited him. Outwardly, he wanted the world to continue thinking he was a fantastically successful tycoon. But then he would whittle things down privately to lower his tax bills.

In recent years, Trump has claimed a tax break available only to people with annual incomes of $500,000 or less, while publicly saying he was worth billions. At the same time as he tried to convince Forbes that his net worth was higher due to the value of his assets, he was also trying to convince local governments that his assets were worth less to avoid taxes.

In his 1987 book, The Art of the Deal, Trump wrote of employing “truthful hyperbole” to get his way. He seems to have used it habitually. A New York Times investigation into his business record found “persistent patterns in the way Mr. Trump bends or breaks the truth,” adding “it is hard to find a project he touched that did not produce allegations of broken promises, blatant lies, or outright fraud.”

Nearly every politician is guilty of spinning facts, and Republicans had already indulged in more than their fair share of this before Trump ran for office. One notable purveyor of sketchy math and exaggeration has been Paul Ryan, now Speaker of the House.

As chairman of the House Budget Committee, Ryan released budget plan after budget plan that simply didn’t add up. His 2013 version called for tax cuts that would have cost $5.7 trillion over a decade, which he promised to cover by eliminating deductions. Yet he didn’t name a single specific deduction for removal, and cutting all of them would have saved less than $2 trillion.

Ryan’s budgets also called for acute cuts in non-defense spending, totaling $4.8 trillion over a decade in his 2014 version. But he didn’t articulate exactly how this would be accomplished, or make clear that it would include everything from scientific research to K-12 education to assistance for the elderly.

Republicans didn’t call Ryan out for avoiding the hard truths. Instead, they voted to pass his budgets four years in a row.

Trump’s lie didn’t die. Instead, it became larger than life.

During his first year in office, Trump has taken this propensity toward fuzzy math and oversold promises to new levels, in the process giving others the license to lie. Republicans, under Trump, have breached the wall between upbeat spin and outright mendacity.

As Trump released his tax plan in September, his team made a bold claim—that the plan would more than pay for itself. It would generate enough new revenues from economic growth, they said, to offset the loss incurred by reducing taxes.

Virtually no economists agreed that this would happen. But Trump’s lie didn’t die. Instead, it became larger than life.

Secretary of the Treasury Steve Mnuchin boasted that the bill would not just pay for itself, but

pay down the national debt. The Treasury Department went so far as to release what it called a study—which was more like talking points—showing that the bill would pay for itself. Yet even that analysis had to rely on the assumption that Congress will enact other, unspecified legislation that will supposedly boost growth.

In fact, nonpartisan analyses have predicted the tax bill will instead blow a hole in government revenues. But when the Congressional Budget Office, Congress’s scorekeeper, told this truth, Republicans responded by trying to undermine the agency’s legitimacy.

“While past Republican advocates for tax cuts would claim growth effects would offset part of the cost of the cuts, they rarely argued that the cuts would totally offset the cost, as the evidence was and is just not there,” Bernstein notes. “They’re definitely far less fact-driven than any past administration, and they’re much more comfortable embracing falsehoods.”

According to the Tax Policy Center, the largest share of Republicans’ tax cuts will go to “taxpayers in the 95th to 99th percentiles of the income distribution.” And, within a decade, poor and middle-class families will end up with an actual tax increase or no help at all even as the rich hold on to their benefits.

Yet Republicans have continually argued that their bill is fashioned to help ordinary citizens. “This plan is for the middle-class families in this country who deserve a break,” Ryan claimed. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell asserted, “Here’s what we set out to do: Take money out of Washington’s pockets and put it back in the pockets of middle-class Americans.”

If our own President can’t decide whether the objective numbers released by government agencies are phony or real, how can anyone discern the truth?

The Trump Administration went even further, claiming that the rich weren’t even going to get a cut at all. The Treasury Department released an analysis claiming, implausibly, that every household will get $4,000. Trump said it would be “so bad for rich people,” while the “Mnuchin rule” was coined after the Treasury Secretary promised that the rich would not get an “absolute tax cut.”

Trump has taken an existing inclination to exaggerate or misdirect and pushed the limits of what’s acceptable. Now Republicans can outright lie with few repercussions. He laid the groundwork for his party to govern without regard for reality.

The implications are deeply troubling. If our own President can’t decide whether the objective numbers released by government agencies are phony or real, how can anyone discern the truth? It means that debate over the best course forward can’t even begin on a shared understanding of what our problems are.

Politics has never been a game of squeaky-clean truth telling, but Trump has spent his first year in office lying and misusing data to his own ends. The changes he’s unleashed portend a dark future for honest debate and reality-based policymaking.

“When facts are on the run, those wielding the facts are far less effective,” Bernstein laments. “This isn’t new, but it’s worse now.” 

Bryce Covert is an independent journalist writing about the economy. She is a contributing op-ed writer at The New York Times and also writes for the New Republic, The Nation, and other outlets.