But anti-dumping duties layered on existing tariffs don’t care about speeches. They add. They don’t subtract. When the price of a staple jumps, it doesn’t announce itself as ideology. It shows up as a smaller bag, a skipped purchase, a restaurant that quietly changes menus.¹⁰
Trump has also promised that tariffs will fund rebate checks—two thousand dollars per household—sometimes in the same breath that he insists Americans don’t pay the tariffs at all.¹¹ Both claims cannot be true at the same time. Neither survives contact with a calculator.¹²
At a food pantry in Lowell, a volunteer showed me a clipboard tracking demand for dry goods. Pasta was circled in red.
“People come in with screenshots,” she said. “Videos. They ask why this hasn’t reached them yet.”
This is where Trump’s numerical absurdities do their most damage. Not because they’re wrong—but because they reprogram expectations. They tell people relief has already happened, that if you’re still struggling, the problem must be you, or the store, or the pharmacist.
When Trump says inflation has “stopped,” he’s confusing a rate with a level.¹³ When he says prices have “come way down,” he’s narrating a reversal that never occurred. When he says a 700 percent decrease, he’s offering magic.
Magic is comforting. Math is not.
A retired machinist in New Hampshire told me he delayed replacing his refrigerator because he’d heard appliances would get cheaper once the trade fight settled. The compressor finally died in February. The replacement cost more than the one he’d bought a decade earlier.¹⁴
“I waited for the miracle,” he said. “It didn’t come.”
None of this would matter if Trump’s numbers were just noise. But they aren’t. They justify policies that raise prices, squeeze margins, and then deny the squeeze exists. They turn definitional errors into governing principles.
A country can survive disagreement. It cannot survive the routine abandonment of arithmetic.
At Maria’s pharmacy, the patient with diabetes came back the next week. He had checked the price again. It was the same.
“I guess it hasn’t hit us yet,” he said.
Maria rang him up and handed him the receipt.
“No,” she said quietly. “This is it.”
The danger of a 700 percent decrease isn’t that it’s a lie. It’s that it teaches people to stop trusting their own eyes when the receipt doesn’t match the speech—and to wait, just a little longer, for a miracle that never arrives.