It's beginning to look a lot like bad math, everywhere you go

Last week, I promised you something quick for this week's edition of the newsletter, as we downshift into 2026. And then the president decided to make some charts and, well, here we are.

Chapter 1(a)
The administration charts the same way it does everything else

On Wednesday of this week, Donald Trump walked to a lectern at The Philip Bump and The People's House (my friends held a vote, congratulations to me!) and berated America for not appreciating his presidency.

This is not really an exaggeration, as you probably know. A clearly annoyed Trump attacked Joe Biden's presidency and then insisted the economy is doing better than people think — which, ironically, is something Joe Biden did during his presidency.

And if you refused to believe him, you ingrates, Trump did something else that Biden did: he showed us charts.

If you didn't see them, that's because only Fox News put them on the air, to the White House's annoyance. (Sean Hannity, picking up coverage on the channel once Trump was done, declared that "I think they very effectively used these charts tonight.")

"I was expecting when I was flipping around to just see the slides everywhere," economic adviser Kevin Hassett moaned to "Morning Joe." "Gosh, we spent so much time on them."

You did?

If you're curious, you can see some of them at the White House website. Like, for example, this chart of price changes under each president.

To recycle a joke I made last month, it's too bad the price of cherries didn't fall, because then they could have picked cherries.

What the chart above shows is twofold. First, some prices have gone down since the beginning of the year (most notably eggs, prices of which had spiked last year due to bird flu). Second, it shows that prices surged on a number of things under Biden because of inflation. Which, yeah, we knew.

There are lots of prices that have gone up under Trump, of course, because that is how inflation works. When I was still at The Washington Post, I helped make a tool that shows price increases on food items. The cost of basically everything that isn't egg-dependent has risen.

We can see that in consumer price index data, too. In most cases, the trends that existed in 2024 continued into 2025. (The overall change in inflation is shown in light blue.) There are exceptions — like electricity prices, which have surged.

Trump is heavily fixated on the price of gasoline, which, he told people, is down near or below $2. It's a tough sell because not only do people buy their own gas, gas stations have the inconvenient habit of displaying their prices in very large numbers in very public places. And, anyway, that's not what Trump's chart says.

That chart's pretty accurate, much moreso than when Democrats tried to make a gas-prices-are-down chart in 2021. But, by including data only since 2017, it ignores that prices rose in his first term. Its stumpiness also makes it hard to see that prices have been falling in fits and starts since 2022.

Trump also revived one of his favorite talking points from 2024: We should pay attention to employment among native-born Americans. It's up, he insisted, with a graph to prove it.

This is a rhetorical point, not an economic one.

The apparent drop is because fewer immigrants are being measured in the labor force, probably in part due to Trump's anti-immigrant policies. But it's also because the data are subject to various statistical flukes, making comparisons (particularly over time) problematic. The White House should know this, having been called out on it before, but why let accuracy get in the way of immigrant-bashing?

We could also look at the data this way, obscuring the denominator (the number of people in the labor force) but showing similar overall employment trends.

Getting back to Hassett's complaint, you can understand why (responsible) cable channels would be wary of slapping Trump charts up on TV: he has a history of using lousy charts for rhetorical purposes. He and his team like the aura of legitimacy data visualizations provide and they try to siphon off some of that legitimacy for themselves.

Attempting that familiar ploy during his speech, you'll be interested to know, was far from the most mathematically egregious thing Team Trump did this week.

Chapter 1(b)
Trump rolls out the New Math

You've probably heard Trump say (as he did in that speech) that his administration is reducing the price of prescription drugs by 400 or 500 or 600 percent — a nifty feat that, basic math will tell you, means that drug manufacturers will be paying you to purchase their medicines. Because, after all, a 100 percent discount is a full discount. A 200 percent discount means a full discount (100 percent) plus you get the full price of the product given to you (the other 100 percent).

This is basic stuff, which you would think that, say, a member of the Cabinet would understand. But in an interview with Fox News's John Roberts, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick — who came to D.C. from Wall Street — apparently didn't.

Roberts: Well, if you cut something by 100%, the cost goes down to zero. If you cut it by 4, 5, or 600%, the drug companies are actually paying you to take their product. So it raises the question, how much of last night's speech was hyperbole, and how much was fact?

Lutnick: Nah, what he's saying is, if a drug was $100, and you bring the drug down to $13, right? If you're looking at it from $13, it's down seven times.

Roberts: It's not a 600—

Lutnick: Well, but it's 700% higher price before. It's down 700% now, right? So $13 would have to go up 700% to get back to the old one. So it all depends on what you look at.

Uh, no. It depends on how honest you want to be.

To calculate a percentage change, the math is simple. You take the new value and subtract the old value, dividing the result by the old value. So a drop from $100 to $13 would be -$87 (13 minus 100) divided by $100 — or 0.87, which equals -87 percent.

Lutnick is proposing that we flip it: old minus new divided by new. Which, in his example, would be ($100-$13)/$13 – or 669 percent. Positive 669 percent, mind you.

It's a ridiculous claim, one contrived to make Trump's ridiculous math seem less ridiculous. It's like saying that Trump's approval rating is up 10 percent since January because it went from 48 to 43 percent.

So here's a clip-and-save visual you can use to remember how not to do Trump Math.

If you happen to work at the Commerce Department, please drop one off at Lutnick's office.

Chapter 2
An objective sorting of Christmas music

Getting back to my original intended focus of this newsletter: It is Christmas time, which a pundit once observed as "the most wonderful time of the year." (This is debatable.)

This also means that a lot of familiar songs are played on repeat: some good, some terrible. And this got me thinking about developing a means of visualizing just how good or terrible they might be.

I took a USA Today report on the most-streamed songs of the holiday season and created a New-York-magazine-style matrix of them on two axes. From top to bottom, my personal, objective assessment of how good or bad the song is. From left to right, where it sits from piped-in department-store dreck to legitimate seasonal nostalgia trigger.

First, here are the songs, thrown into a Spotify playlist.

And now, the rankings — using the songs' album art to position them.