The Trump Administration has made us all bobbleheads, with our heads shaking only left-right-left-right, for the past 6 months. Discerning trends and themes is sometimes like trying to understand a person experiencing hypoxia – the delusional behavior comes so fast and furious, its just hard to keep up. We have all learned how uniquely unqualified the government officials are, and the persistent inability of the administration to follow the law (even when courts spell it out for them) cannot be underestimated. But this week it became quite obvious that the Trump Administration has declared war on math. I do mean math – the discipline of calculating relationships between things using a consistent, scientific method.

It was this week in American history that the President of the United States, unhappy with the results from the monthly employment reports, fired the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Now, employment figures (and unemployment rates) are calculated monthly based on two surveys (a survey of households and a survey of businesses) and longstanding statistical methods are applied to arrive at a total workforce number and an unemployment % number. They are not calculated by one person – there is an entire department of economists and statisticians that concentrate on these calculations each month. And they are updated monthly (largely due to businesses giving incomplete information to the survey). But the numbers were different from the delusion embedded in the President’s mind that the economy is doing great under his regime. Despite his administration having laid off well over 100,000 people. Despite over 2,000 businesses having announced layoffs this year. Despite the uncertainty of our tariff regime stalling employment decision making at businesses. And despite the administration’s immigration policy actively reducing the number of foreign born people in the employment market. But these logical, rational causes for a declining employment market cannot compete with the ego-driven math of ‘dear leader’.

Math is not the strong suit of this administration. This is the administration that adopted a reciprocal tariff formula that made no sense. This is the administration that pushed through a budget bill that is poised to increase the nation’s debt by $3.4 Trillion dollars over the next ten years (and more than $4 Trillion when accounting for the increased interest costs) – while claiming that it was decreasing the debt and deficits. We’ve already belabored the persistent inability of the administration to perform simple math equations (read MAGA Math).

The Secretary of Health and Human Services, Robert F Kennedy Jr, has been one of the most consistent warriors against math in the administration. He is often tasked with explaining the results of health studies (which admittedly does require a bit of intellect to comprehend and communicate). Unfortunately, his greatest skill appears to be failing to convey results accurately – not only inaccurately but in a deceptive fashion which communicates the opposite of what the studies show. In examples of COVID vaccine studies, mercury in vaccines, the cause of the Spanish Flu, and his most OCD-level bugaboo, autism, RFK Jr. spouts results that don’t exist. It doesn’t appear that he has a scant understanding of how studies are conducted or how to analyze data. But like his boss, that doesn’t stop him from declaring his own results (damn the mathematics) for everyone to swallow. In fact, he is counting on Americans inability to comprehend scientific study results (or rudimentary understanding of statistics) to foist his 19th century version of medicine and health on all of us.

But his boss, the President of the United States, recently indicated that he is going to reduce drug prices by 1000%. Yep, drug makers will be paying you to take their drugs. The math isn’t mathing – maybe that’s why he’s so anxious to eliminate the Department of Education. Of all of the deficits that this administration talks about, the understanding of math is the deficit that is most prominent.

And the national disgrace continues…