What did Donald Trump do today?
He got very confused about certain numbers.
All that is known of Trump's public schedule today was a tour by helicopter of some golf courses at Andrews Air Force Base, which he did in the company of former champion and course designer Jack Nicklaus. But he was active on social media, and in a way that was unnervingly disconnected from reality even by his own standards.
Two posts from his private microblogging site sum it up. In the first, Trump asserted that "I HAVE JUST GOTTEN THE HIGHEST POLL NUMBERS OF MY 'POLITICAL CAREER.'" This is, to be blunt, pretty much the opposite of the truth. In reality, his approval rating has been dragged down into the thirties by the enormous resistance he's faced over his stonewalling on the Epstein investigation, the shutdown, the inflation caused by his trade war, and the backlash over his immigration enforcement.
This is one of those situations where it is difficult to tell if Trump is deliberately lying about his popularity or simply unable to accept reality, but he has claimed to be at record highs in the polls when the reality is just the opposite again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again over the course of his presidency.
If he isn't lying, then Trump probably isn't entirely to blame for not knowing how badly Americans have soured on him. His staff carefully filters out news that they think will upset him, which includes bad polling numbers, and substitutes printouts of carefully curated articles that flatter him.
In a second post, he claimed that his tariffs had brought in "TRILLIONS" of dollars in revenue. Since American consumers pay those tariffs in the form of higher prices, it's just as well that this is also a lie. In reality, the United States is on track to collect under $30 billion a month, or perhaps $350 billion per year, in the apparently unlikely event that Trump's tariff decrees remain in force.
"Trillions" is increasingly a word that Trump throws into conversations almost at random. He's made several claims recently about having secured "trillions" of dollars in foreign investments, even when (as with the recent example of Saudi Arabia) the "trillions" he's imagining are more than the entire economic output of the country in question.
Then again, Trump may also be growing even more confused about what a "tariff" is, because in the same post he accused conservative Republican donors Leonard Leo and Charles Koch of having "ripped off the United States of America for years through the use of their own Tariffs," something that makes absolutely no sense as Leo and Koch are private citizens.
Why does this matter?
- Past a certain point, it doesn't matter whether a president is lying or delusional.