President Donald Trump is notoriously hard to pin down on details. His view of his performance tends toward lavishly unspecific superlatives—something or other is always the greatest in history. And when he does reach for a statistic, well, it’s an even money bet that it’s got some verifiability issues. But the world beyond Trump’s twitter feed does in fact still operate on data that doesn’t come pre-marinated in self-congratulatory spin. So if you’re wondering how Trump fared in 2018—by measures he has invoked as well as by some he probably might prefer to ignore—POLITICO Magazine has assembled this holiday sampler of numbers that might provide relief from the fire hose of alternative facts.

1. Number of campaign rallies Trump held in 2018: 44 [1]
2. Number of times he visited one of his golf clubs: 67 [6]
3. Number of war zones visited: 1
4. Number of 2018 general election candidates Trump endorsed: 90 [2]
5. Percentage of those candidates who won: 55
6. Percentage increase from 2017 to 2018 of tweets from @realDonaldTrump: 32 [3]
7. Percentage increase from 2017 to 2018 in references to “witch hunt”: 620 [3]
8. Percentage decrease from 2017 to 2018 in references to the stock market: 54 [3]
9. Number of Cabinet secretaries who were removed or quit: 10 [4]
10. Percentage of Trump’s executive staff that has turned over in first two years: 65 [5]
11. Number of presidents who’ve had more than one chief of staff in their first two years: 4 [5]
12. Number of presidents other than Trump who have had three: 0 [5]
13. Number of jobs gained in 2018 (through November): 2.28 million [7]
14. Number of those jobs (approx.) that were in coal mines: 1,100 [7]
15. Percentage increase in average hourly earnings in 2018 (as of November): 3.1 [7]
16. Percentage increase in U.S. trade deficit since Trump took office: 18 [8]
17. Number of books about Trump that were best-sellers in 2018: 25 [9]
18. Number of them that were favorable to Trump: 10

Sources:
[1] https://factba.se/topic/calendar
[2] https://ballotpedia.org/Endorsements_by_Donald_Trump
[3] http://www.trumptwitterarchive.com/
[4] https://www.brookings.edu/research/tracking-turnover-in-the-trump-administration/
[5] Kathryn Dunn Tenpas, Brookings Institution
[6] https://trumpgolfcount.com/displayoutings
[7] Bureau of Labor Statistics
[8] U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis
[9] http://www.hawes.com/2018/2018.htm

RUAIRÍ ARRIETA-KENNA and BILL DURYEA

articolo pubblicato su Politico.com