TRUMP OVERCOUNTS YET AGAIN!

FOR A GUY WITH SUCH GENIUS (SELF-PROFESSED), Donald Trump sure can’t count. As reported February 16, 2024 in Voice of America, The New York Times, and just about everywhere else but Fox Entertainment, “Donald Trump must pay $354.9 million in penalties for fraudulently overstating his net worth to dupe lenders,” this particular quote from VoA.

And for those of us with memories apparently better than batshit-crazy Republicans, this isn’t the first time his chronic hyperbola has come to light. 

Here are tidbits ranging from his miscounting the presidential election of 2020, the crowd count at his 2017 inauguration, and even earlier in counting the number of floors in Trump Tower. I could include as well Trump signing a document 30 years ago about his NYC apartment but later expanding the claimed size almost threefold in financial statements to banks, but let’s just examine these other miscounts in chronological order.

Trump Tower, New York City. Image by Hiroko Masuike/The New York Times. 

Trump Tower’s Faux 68th. In The New York Times, November 1, 2016, Vivian Lee reported, “Donald Trump’s Math Takes His Towers to Greater Heights.” She wrote, “In real life, Trump Tower could not be elongated. But Trumph Arithmetic found a way. Though the tower was built with 58 floors, Mr. Trump later explained to The New York Times that because there was a soaring pink marble atrium and 19 commercial floors at the bottom, he could see no good reason not to list the first residential floor as the 30th floor. The pinnacle became the 68th — the height that appears in marketing materials, online search results and news articles to this day.”

Image from The New York Times, November 1, 2016. Sources: N.Y. Attorney General’s Office, N.Y.C. Buildings Department, Trump Organization.

“The Republican who would be president,” Lee continued, “has been accused of exaggerating his own height by an inch. To suggestions that he has abnormally short fingers, he has responded by boasting, during a presidential debate, about other parts of his anatomy.” 

Class will out.

Trump’s Faux Inauguration Count. “Crowd-Count Crowing,” January 30, 2017, here at Simanaitis Says observed, “In these days of alternative facts, I realize that anything scientific may be a hard sell to some. However, recent brouhahas over counting people make this an irresistible topic of scientific research.”

I wrote, “Scientists (there’s that S word again) who specialize in such matters suggest that the Washington, D.C., Women’s March had perhaps three times as many people as the Inauguration. Marcel Altenburg and Keith Still, specialists at Britain’s Manchester Metropolitan University, estimate the Women’s March crowd had at least 470,000 people. The Inauguration had about 160,000 people.”

Above, the 2017 Inauguration; below, the 2017 Washington, D.C., Women’s March; each image at the time of peak density. Images from CNN.

Trump crowed later, “We had 250,000 people literally around—you know—in the little bowl that we constructed. That was 250,000 people. The rest of the 20-block area, all the way back to the Washington Monument, was packed. So we caught them, and we caught them in a beauty. And I think they’re going to pay a big price.”

Well, yes. We’ve all been paying a big price since January 2017. 

Briefly “Let Us Celebrate!” Back on January 20, 2021, SimanaitisSays wrote, “Hurrah! Hurrah! Hurrah! Hurrah!  One hurrah for each of the most embarrassing four years in our nation’s history. And that includes episodes with white supremacists like Woodrow Wilson, immoral wackos like Warren G. Harding, and ‘I am not a crook’ personages such as Richard Nixon.” 

Would that Trump slink away to Mar-a-Loco (as columnist Frank Bruni calls it), and the rest of us could eschew cults of ignorance.

Trump’s 2020 Miscount. A statesmanlike acceptance of the Electoral College’s Biden 306 to Trump 232 and popular vote of 81,284,666 (51.3 percent) versus 74,224,319 (46.8 percent) was not to be, what with continued Trump Arithmetic: In The New York Times, January 3, 2021, Michael D. Shear and Stephanie Saul reported “President Trump pressured Georgia’s Republican secretary of state to ‘find’ him enough votes to overturn the presidential election and vaguely threatened him with ‘a criminal offense’ during an hourlong telephone call on Saturday, according to an audio recording of the conversation.”

The report continued, “Mr. Trump, who has spent almost nine weeks making false conspiracy claims about his loss to President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr., told Brad Raffensperger, the state’s top elections official, that he should recalculate the vote count so Mr. Trump, not Mr. Biden, would end up winning the state’s 16 electoral votes.” 

Then Came January 6, 2021. “Republican Theater of the Absurd Parts 1 and 2” described Trump’s more than one-hour speech telling supporters on the Washington, D.C., Eclipse, “We fight like hell. And if you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country anymore….”

“What followed,” this website recounted, “was live television coverage of Trump supporters taking his advice and breaching the U.S. Capitol. The Vice President and Congressmen scrambled for secure locations. Insurrectionists fought with Capitol police, stormed into Congressional offices, and rummaged through Senate and House documents.”

The opera ain’t over ’til the fat lady sings. This Trump thing ain’t over until the alleged 232-lb Trump confronts 91 felonies. (This last number is a correct figure.) ds

© Dennis Simanaitis, SimanaitisSays.com, 2024