Are We Supposed to Believe This?
The Numbers Don’t Stick
On Trust, Loyalty, and the Arithmetic of Dishonesty
You don’t lose trust in numbers by accident. You lose it when the people delivering them have already told you, in a hundred other ways, that truth is optional.
It started the day loyalty replaced competence as the price of admission to the room where the numbers get made. It accelerated every time someone was fired for telling the truth. And it became irreversible the moment the public stopped being surprised by the lies.
PrumpTutin doesn’t govern like a man constrained by reality. He governs like reality is a negotiable asset—something to be shaped, pressured, reframed until it serves the moment. The numbers aren’t separate from that instinct. They are part of it. Inflation figures, jobs reports, GDP revisions—they’re not measurements to this administration. They’re instruments. Tools of narrative. And if the narrative needs a 2.4 percent, then 2.4 percent is what you’ll get, give or take a footnote no one reads.
