The U.S. presidential race has officially commenced and the time to get to work is now, as Vice President Kamala Harris said at the outset of her DNC acceptance speech. (Which I took to mean the quest to end Trump’s excruciating brand of mind control once and for all.) The battle has begun. The weaponry and machinery of politics—including persuasion and manipulation—will soon reach warp-speed levels, even more now than a month ago. Media platforms have revved up herds of stampeding experts, pundits, commentators, “fact” checkers and fiction enablers, from countless perspectives and of all stripes. Partisan soothsayers have been champing at the bits and bytes to get their voices heard and faces booked on every conceivable outlet with as much frequency as breathing and blood flow will allow.
Now, don’t misunderstand, I’m not anti-pundit; I spent the entire DNC week watching two screens simultaneously. On one, PBS’ gaggle of pundits translating what I had just heard and/or missed coming from the main stage; on the other, PBS’ stream of back episodes from the drama “Grantchester” (incidentally, it is surprisingly good). Really astute pundits are enlightening and essential (PBS has some of the good ones), but the worst (and there are many) are like black mold. Some of their toxicity comes from prejudiced misrepresentation that goes viral. Or, as England’s late-nineteenth-century Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli is quoted as saying, “There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics.”
Which segues into my own punditry regarding candidate Donald J. Trump’s employ of all three.
As long as Trump’s gnarly attack style continues to dominate the current campaign vernacular, there is no way to have substantive debates on any issues. Perhaps there is not a chance in hell, anyway, that he can discuss true policies, because he either doesn’t know or understand them. Well, I’ve got a solution that might appeal to his character (and add to his incredibility): Learn to statisticulate. (Don, it will provide a simulacrum of knowledge.)
The word comes from statistic (late 18th century: from the German statistisch (adjective), statistik (noun, “analysis of numerical data for political reasons”) and the suffix ulate (derived from the Latin ulus, which means small or minute). Trump knows a little something about small things. So why tax him on taxes or burden him with economics or healthcare or any science, for that matter? Instead of spewing his bile and lying about things that do not matter, his campaign should pivot to statisticulation.
This “classic” term coined by Darrell Huff in his 1954 book How to Lie With Statistics (illustrated by Time and Fortune‘s infographic artist Irving Geiss) refers to the distortion of statistical data that can be “twisted, exaggerated, oversimplified and distorted” and passed off as truth.
Trump might, for example, argue that, statistically speaking, he has more people in his extra-large rallies wearing, say, MAGA merch, than Harris has at hers. And he’d be statistically correct because not many in her increasingly larger crowds wear Trumpware. Likewise, he might argue that, statistically, he has lowered middle-class taxes … along with taxes on the rich, and he’d be telling the statistical truth because when statisticulating, numbers don’t lie—they just don’t always add up.
As Huff wrote, “In my experience, [I’ve not seen many economists giving] the customer a better break than the facts call for, and often they give him a worse one.”
As a flim-flam man, Trump’s lying with statistics is as easy as counting to 10. I know he learned how to count (they teach it at military school). He needn’t be a brainiac to statisticulate. And memorization is not necessary. Just make it up—a skill he has definitely mastered—and then just keep it up (an act that is in dispute).