Trump Hopes Americans Are as Bad at Math as He Is

As he has amply demonstrated with his repeated claims of wanting to lower drug prices by up to 1,500 percent, which is impossible, Donald Trump is terrible at math. And, based on a couple of social media posts from Sunday night, a key pillar of his midterm strategy is to hope that most Americans are just as arithmetically challenged.

It’s pretty clear what the president was trying to do. Seeing how the affordability crisis, which he exacerbated with his tariffs and the war in Iran, is a real problem for Republicans in the upcoming elections, Trump sought to point to his record on inflation.

The problem is that the easiest way to do so, i.e., by comparing inflation now to where it was when he took office, would make him look bad because it is not only higher but also eclipses the increase in the average wage, which means Americans now effectively earn less.

That, of course, is not good for a president who promised to bring down prices on day one of his second term.

Since Republicans can’t run on the facts, a little bit of trickery is needed.

Therefore, Trump shared a couple of graphics that supposedly demonstrate that his track record on inflation stacks up favorably to that of all of his recent predecessors.

There is just one tiny problem: While they do show that cumulative inflation in his second term is lower, that’s because the statistical geniuses who put them together conveniently overlook the fact that Trump has only been in office for a year and a half so far while the others served 48 months.

When you stop this animation after eight seconds, i.e., 18 months into each presidency, you’ll see that the current rate of inflation is the fourth highest, trailing only that of Joe Biden, George H. W. Bush, and George W. Bush’s second term.

From that point on, Trump’s rate stays stagnant (again, it is cumulative, and there is nothing to add yet because we only have the figures through July of this year), while the others continue to increase. Using this trick, the creator of the animation makes it appear as though inflation in the president’s second term is the lowest of them all, which is hardly surprising since they are comparing Trump’s performance after 18 months to that of everybody else’s after four full years.

Essentially, it’s the same as claiming that gas prices are lower now because Americans have spent less on gasoline during this term than during the full term of another president without taking into account that those lasted more than 2.5 times as long, i.e., that people had to fill up their tanks nearly three times as often.

Or like saying that you spent less on groceries this year than in 2025 even though more than one-third of the year is still to come.

That’s not how math works.

Trump also shared another post from his daughter-in-law, which she calls “a great chart,” that is equally damning. Once again, it compares the cumulative inflation of his second term through 18 months to that of the full terms of his predecessors.

However, at the current rate, Trump would end up with a cumulative inflation of 12.56 percent, which would be the third highest in the past 40 years – and the only two people ahead of him (Biden and Bush Sr.) ended up being one-term presidents.

To be fair, while these graphics are highly deceptive, it is possible that Trump, who believes that you can decrease the value of a thing by more than 100 percent, simply doesn’t understand that.

There is a very good chance that he truly believes that this is somehow good news for him even though anybody with a middle school grasp of math and logic knows that it isn’t.