Data is merely a weapon to be used to make a rhetorical point, rather than information that might inform policy-making. (Meg Kelly/The Washington Post)
For most of his first year in office, President Trump bragged about how much apprehensions had fallen on the southern border. Using cherry-picked numbers, he claimed a drop of 40 percent, then 61 percent, and then 78 percent. “Under past administrations, the border didn’t go down — it went up,” he falsely claimed.
The president stuck to the 78 percent statistic for months, even when his own fuzzy accounting was out of date. Then he was silent for months as apprehensions began climbing until he rolled out a new claim: “We have set records on arrests at the borders.”
Both claims are from the same data maintained by U.S. Customs and Border Protection. It’s just that Trump flipped the script, twisting the data to present the rosiest picture possible. Whereas a drop in arrests previously was cause for celebration, now a surge in arrests is even better.
View the complete December 5 article by Glenn Kessler on The Washington Post website here.