Donald Trump and the power of the big (fake) number
Don't believe the hype about his "deals."
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If there’s one thing Donald Trump loves more than a deal, it’s the announcement of a deal, the part where he comes before the cameras in triumph to tell the world that through his superhuman negotiating skills he has secured an agreement that will bring a future of unfathomable riches to all Americans.
These announcements invariably center on a dollar figure, usually one almost preposterously large. Five hundred billion, two trillion, 10 trillion — we are all supposed to marvel at the majesty of this number, to the point where our critical faculties fail us and we accept it without skepticism.
There may never have been a better case study of this than Trump’s recent trip to the Middle East. During the tour, Trump repeatedly touted the enormous deals he supposedly obtained from Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates, but an examination of those and some other recent deals he has announced — all portrayed as new investments pouring into the American economy — shows them to be largely a mirage.
We’re the marks, and the suspiciously large dollar number is the centerpiece of the con.
So many deals you’ll be tired of all the deals
Trump returned from the trip claiming to have obtained “over $2 trillion in great deals,” which would indeed be remarkable. Since our entire GDP last year was around $30 trillion, that alone would mean an increase of almost 7 percent in the size of our economy; the last time we had that much growth in a single year was in 1984.
(As this newsletter was being prepared for publication yesterday, Trump claimed even more preposterously that on his trip he secured “a nice contribution of about $5 trillion.")
Alas, the $2 trillion figure is essentially fictional. First, as the Washington Post noted, many of the deals the Trump administration has been claiming credit for from this trip were actually inked under the Biden administration, and some are absurdly exaggerated to boot. In one case, the administration claimed an agreement for Amazon to provide $1 billion worth of cloud services to the UAE was actually a $181 billion deal.
And according to one source who spoke to the Post, the Saudi government contacted “all the top businessmen” in the country and asked how much business they have in the United States, so it could add up the numbers and present them to Trump for him to announce as though they represented new investments.
As for the investments from the Gulf governments, “these sovereign wealth investment funds already have a substantial investment portfolio in the United States,” Adam Hersh, senior economist at the Economic Policy Institute, told Public Notice. “So a lot of what’s being announced is probably stuff that they already are doing or were going to do anyway.”
Many of the figures were provided with few details, and even if they do materialize, it would have to be over the course of years or even decades.
Consider the money supposedly pouring in from Qatar. Somewhat confusingly, the administration says Trump “signed an agreement with Qatar to generate an economic exchange worth at least $1.2 trillion. President Trump also announced economic deals totaling more than $243.5 billion between the United States and Qatar.” So is it $1.2 trillion or $243.5 billion? It’s impossible to tell.
There is one more specific component, but it might best be called aspirational. Qatar Airways says it will be buying “up to” 210 aircraft from Boeing, which sounds terrific. But Boeing produced only 348 jetliners for all its global customers in 2024, and Qatar Airways’ entire current fleet consists of 233 planes. If the carrier is going to nearly double the size of its fleet, it would take an awfully long time — likely decades. It’s certainly not a bad thing for the American economy if this huge order comes to pass, but that’s a big if.
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Turning to the United Arab Emirates, we see that in reaching its fantastical dollar totals there, the administration is counting an announcement it made in March that the UAE would invest $1.4 trillion “in the United States.” But it’s not clear how the administration calculated that figure, and what numbers they do provide are fuzzy at best.
The largest specific amount, $100 billion, is attributed to the AI Infrastructure Partnership, a collaboration of a group of investment firms and technology companies including BlackRock and Microsoft, to finance artificial intelligence projects. MGX, an investment company owned by the government of Abu Dhabi, is one of the investors.
But $100 billion is the total that project is hoping to “mobilize” and spend around the world, not in the US. Furthermore, how much MGX plans to contribute is not detailed, and it is likely just a fraction. Nevertheless, the administration calls the entire $100 billion a UAE “investment” in the United States, which is clearly misleading if not outright false. The rest of the investments the administration cites — $25 billion here, $1.2 billion there — don’t add up to anything near the flashy $1.4 trillion total.
There is one MGX investment we know more about, but it’s more like a payoff to the Trump family than an “investment.” MGX is purchasing $2 billion worth of stablecoins issued by World Liberty Financial, the crypto firm recently created by the Trump family and its sketchy partners.
That arrangement will net the Trumps something on the order of $80 million a year (in actual money, not crypto), according to Forbes.
This raises another issue: Trump might argue that lying about the details doesn’t matter as long as he’s bringing business to the United States. But as Hersh told me, “There’s a difference between promoting the United States as a favorable investment environment and cutting these deals where the president is benefiting personally from the deal, whether it’s financially or to tailor this to his political benefit.” And with Trump, we know what takes precedence.
We’ve seen this movie before
Trump has put on versions of this show many times, and the same pattern always recurs: He makes a splashy announcement which receives credulous coverage, then most reporters move on and don’t follow up to see whether the dramatic dollar figure he announced actually panned out.
The structure of news helps explain why: An announcement is a discrete event that occurs on a particular day and is straightforward to cover, while unfulfilled promises occur over time and require enterprising journalism to report on. Trump understands this perfectly well, and he also knows how seductive a big number can be. This is the man who says his buildings have more floors than they actually do and claimed his 11,000-square-foot apartment was 30,000 square feet.
Case in point: One day after taking office, Trump held a dramatic White House press conference to announce the creation of “Stargate,” a large data center project to power AI. In attendance were Larry Ellison from Oracle, Sam Altman from OpenAI, and Masayoshi Son of SoftBank, the Japanese investment firm.
“Put that name down in your books because I think you're going to hear a lot about it in the future,” Trump said, “a new American company that will invest $500 billion at least in AI infrastructure in the United States and very, very quickly, moving very rapidly, creating over 100,000 American jobs almost immediately.”
The $500 billion figure was highly questionable, and the idea of immediately creating 100,000 jobs was bonkers.
Yet in the coverage of the Stargate announcement, the $500 billion figure was in all the headlines: “Trump announces a $500 billion AI infrastructure investment in the US” (CNN); “Trump highlights partnership investing $500 billion in AI” (AP); “Trump tech agenda begins with $500B private AI plan and cuts to regulation” (Washington Post).
But the figure is imaginary. OpenAI and SoftBank have pledged to spend just $19 billion each on Stargate, which neither company appears to have lying around at the moment, so even that will still have to be mostly raised or borrowed. As for the rest of the $500 billion, it’s almost purely hypothetical: The project might cost that much, from now until some point in the future, but who knows.
The same is true of Trump’s fantastical 100,000 jobs created “almost immediately.” There is only one Stargate location under construction, in Texas. Data centers create a fair number of jobs during the building phase — in April there were around 2,000 workers erecting the project — but once the center is operational, that number drops precipitously. The Stargate facility will reportedly employ only about 100 people long term.
But both Trump and the Stargate participants had an interest in exaggerating the project beyond all reason: He got to claim that he is bringing limitless prosperity to America, and they fed the AI hype that boosts their businesses.
And companies know that a good way to gain Trump’s favor — or perhaps more importantly, avoid his wrath — is to give him credit for what they were planning to do anyway even before he got elected. Apple has played this game with particular skill. In November 2019, Trump visited an Apple computer plant in Texas, then tweeted, “Today I opened a major Apple Manufacturing plant in Texas that will bring high paying jobs back to America.” But the plant had already been in operation for six years, since early in Barack Obama’s second term.
Then, this February, the company announced that it would spend $500 billion in the United States over the next four years. Much of the coverage portrayed the announcement as a significant shift in response to Trump’s tariffs. Yet when the Wall Street Journal examined the company’s publicly released balance sheets, it concluded that “Apple’s announced figure is in line with what one might expect the company to be spending anyway, given its financials.”
The number is the tell
As the most prodigious liar in the history of politics, Trump deploys many different kinds of falsehood and puffery (ask him about “the most beautiful piece of chocolate cake that you’ve ever seen”), most of which we’ve gotten used to. But Trump’s use of specific dollar figures is troubling precisely because its specificity is meant to communicate something real and concrete. It attracts reporters who repeat the figures without taking the time to look too closely, thereby making them the conduit for Trump’s deception.
It’s fitting that so many of the recent iterations of this technique revolve around artificial intelligence. At the end of Joe Biden’s time in office, his administration put restrictions on the export of computer chips meant for AI systems, banning them entirely to adversaries such as Iran and China and capping exports to all but 18 close American allies. The deals with Gulf countries would effectively remove those limits, and in addition to military hardware and Trump’s good will, that’s what they want most of all: access to the hundreds of thousands of chips needed to run AI at a large scale.
AI is a perfect vehicle for this brand of chicanery because so much of it is built on hype: absurdly optimistic predictions about the future, mind-boggling numbers that its boosters discourage us from interrogating too closely, and assurances that beneficial economic transformation is upon us, far sooner than any reasonable person believes. Trump may not be able to tell you what AI is, but he knows like-minded hype artists when he sees them.
And when they all get together — whether it’s American tech barons looking to raise billions, or Gulf sheiks eager to get their hands on computer chips — we should start from the assumption that when Trump throws out a mind-boggling dollar figure that will supposedly be spent in the American economy, it’s just smoke and mirrors.
That’s it for today
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Thanks for reading.
The fly in the ointment is that if you repeat a lie often enough people begin to believe it. Trump has knowingly used this tactic all his career. The more such a liar is debunked the more publicity the liar gets. It's a bit of a paradox.
Yeah. I remember from his 1st term how Lourdestown was supposed to stay open & Carrier was supposed to stay in the US.
& then there were his 4 casinos, Trump U, all the lies he told about his various properties that were revealed in court.
Lathe4, rinse & repeat.