Where Does Trump’s 92% Come From?

The mystery of the number 92. You're gonna think I'm making this up, but this has all been heavily sourced and researched by the Atlantic. It's a fascinating, fascinating story. It turns out that Donald Trump. This isn't going to be news to you. It's not that he routinely lies. It's that he has a favorite lie to insert in almost any argument. And the lie is 92. He just loves to use the word 92 most frequently. 92%. So this is a take from the article. It's ENTIGLED There's a 92% chance Trump is Making this up in the Atlantic by Marie Rose Scheinerman. I'd urge you to look at it, but the findings are that Trump routinely anchors claims as 92%. Here's an example of some of the things he claims. Trump claimed he won Wayne, North Carolina by 92%. His real margin was 16%. Kind of a big difference there. He says the U.S. controls 92% of the Gulf of Mexico shoreline. The true figure is 46%. Trump claims that egg prices fell 92%. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, which is a part of the federal government run by Trump. It's a 12.7% drop. The administration claims that maritime drug trafficking is down 92 to 96%. But no agency has any data to support this. So we're just seeing again and again and again this 92%. Now, this is just pure fantasy. It doesn't make any sense. It's. None of. It's really adding up. Now, we all know that Trump lies, and there's an. A corrosive effect over time. There is the common myth, let's say with a little bit of credibility, that all politicians lie. How do you know when a politician is lying? His mouth is moving. It's an old, old joke. But there is a quantitative and a qualitative difference here. I'm not condoning lying, but there certainly is something about a politician who acts embarrassed about lying and only lies to maybe cover themselves or prevent them from, from getting massive, massive embarrassment. Trump seems to lie like he breathes. He seems to think there's no other way of doing it, that if there is something he can say that makes him look good, then it's not a lie. He'll just say whatever he wants. So, again, I don't want to sound like I'm Pollyannish and say, oh, I expect a politician to always be 100% truthful. Okay. You can certainly make the case that politicians throughout history here in the United States, elsewhere have told lies. But this idea that we're just going to turn a blind eye and say, well, that's Trump being Trump, and, well, we know he exaggerates why that is defining deviancy downward. To quote the late great. Now I sound like Donald Trump, the late great Senator Patrick Moynihan. And it's something that conservatives traditionally cared a lot about. It's something conservatives thought about a lot in 2015 and 2016, when virtually every single principled conservative thinker, columnist, pundit denounced Donald Trump's candidacy. You've probably forgotten, but National Review had an entire, an entire publication, a monthly publication or entire edition devoted to why Trump was disastrous for the Republican Party to endorse. Part of the reason was he lies all the time. Now we have conservative pundits doing nothing but offering apologies. It may sound obvious, but let me remind you why we care about whether politicians lie or not. Aristotle said falsehood is in itself mean and culpable and truth noble and full of praise. Cicero said truth is corrupted as much by falsehood as by silence. So, yes, Trump is corrupting the public waters, the public discourse with his lies. And yeah, he's called out by mainstream media and centrists and those on the left. But conservatives continue to sort of turn a blind eye and say, well, he should get away with it because the left is somehow worse. Immanuel Kant says, by a lie a man throws away and annihilates his dignity as a man. Edmund Burke, someone a lot of Republicans used to say they respected. Very famous conservative philosopher. Falsehood and delusion are allowed in no case whatever. Abraham Lincoln. No man has a good enough memory to make a successful liar. Yeah, but I guess Abraham Lincoln hadn't encountered Donald Trump because he is a successful liar in the sense that it's gotten him elected once, twice, and according to him, three times to the presidency. At what point is it just too much? At what point do people say, okay, you can lie to me if you're making the economy run really, really well, you can lie to me if you're reducing inflation, you can lie to me if you're keeping us out of war and entanglements, you can lie to me if you're keeping unemployment low. But if you're not really doing any of those things, what good is it? You're not fooling us. Americans are not being fooled into thinking prices are lower now. I guess there some are. If you're a die hard Trump fan, I guess you can convince yourself prices are going down just because he's in office. But is anyone else being fooled? Look, there are a million reasons to differ with any one politician on policy. There are a million one reasons to differ with Trump on policy. But at some point, we have to have an honest conversation with ourselves as Americans, as citizens, regardless of your politics. You may be on the right, you may be on the left, you may want taxes decreased, you may want them increased. I'm here as a sane, sensible centrist. And it gets tiresome when you have a politician who lies about everything all the time because you just sound the. You sound like a nudge. You sound like a broken record if you point out lies repeatedly. Now, Richard Nixon was known Tricky Dick. He was known as a liar, but he was also someone who was embarrassed by it. He was someone who worried about his reputation. He wanted to always have a plausible deniability to his lies. This president doesn't even attempt to have plausible deniability. He just says, if you call me out on my lies, you're fake news. You're a liar, you're a traitor. You're a member of the loony left, the radical left. And sadly, it has worked for him at some level because he is still in office. Now. He's obviously not fooling all the people all the time. He's down to about 38% of the folks he's fooling. Or there's 38% of people in America who says, I say, I know he's lying, and I don't care. What does that say about the state of democracy in America? Now, you might not have liked Joe Biden. Many people didn't. You might have liked George W. Bush, many people didn't. Or Barack Obama. But this idea that you could discount them because everything out of their mouth was a lie, no, no, my friends, that doesn't stand. That in and of itself is a lie. And at some point, we're going to have to take back control of standards in America. And it doesn't seem to be coming from a lot of gatekeepers in the past. Certainly, we can't count on major media to fact check anymore. We certainly can't count on the major platforms because Trump, through his force of will, convinced Facebook and YouTube and others, facts don't matter anymore. You can say the most extreme vitriolic nonsense and conspiracy theories. You can just say, 92% of Americans support me. I won the election by 92%. And nobody's supposed to use editorial judgment anymore. So we have this massive, massive free for all. And we now live in an era where simply calling someone out for spewing nonsense means you're somehow guilty of censorship. You're guilty of deplatforming. Oh, how dare you say someone who doesn't spout nonsense and lies all the time doesn't deserve the biggest platform, the biggest audience, whether we're talking about someone from the White House or someone on YouTube or Facebook or your favorite podcast. So I'm going to try to do my part. I'm going to say, no, you don't get a pass anymore just because you're in high office, Just because you've conditioned everybody into thinking that's your shtick. You should be able to lie all the time. No, lies still need to be called out. And I do want to praise the Atlantic, which is a fine publication, and Marie Rose Scheinerman for, for calling this out, for doing some basic work of saying, hey, there's the president saying he won by 92%. Where have I heard that number before? And whether she used ChatGPT or just Google or just went to the White House press page, she, she spotted this trend of yes, the president is continually just not just making up numbers. We known for a long time he does that, but relying on this crutch of 92%. So I'm going to try to be more diligent myself. Every time I hear the president say something is 92% in his favor, I'm just going to, for one, assume he's lying. Number two, do a quick fact check so I can bring it to your attention. Lots more to come. Glad you're here today with me and it's good to be back home. I've been on the road for the last two weeks in Vietnam on assignment and sightseeing vacation. Also in Taiwan and Sinchu and a number of place. Taipei, number of places. But just got back last night and am back here in the home studio. More to come.