A recent NY Times (August 18th, 2026) carried a Guest Essay, “Trump’s Broken Promises, in 11 Charts” by Steven Rattner. He’s an NYT contributing opinion writer and a former counselor to President Obama’s Treasury Secretary. The essay is a series of 11 short sections, each a kind of split-screen that juxtaposed a promise that candidate Trump made concerning the U.S. economy in 2024 or 2025, followed by a chart with economic data for years leading up to the present. Each promise is presented in quotes with the place and date he made the promise, and the source of each chart is provided below each one.
I’ve neither studied nor practiced economics, so I’m not bringing Rattner’s essay to your attention to discuss the promise or the evidence showing that, to date, these promises have not been kept.
I hope that economists who read the Spy will offer their views on the believability of the charts and their relevance to the promises. Alongside my desire to stimulate an exchange of reader comments, I have two other reasons for bringing this essay to your attention.
Several of my columns have focused on the distinction between the things we know to be true and other things that we believe or suspect may be true. Two columns in particular, Prove It, and The Great Asymmetry, explored the general problem of distinguishing truth from things that may, or may not be true. We may believe them to be true so deeply that we forget they are just possibilities, or we may suspect them to be true because we don’t like the alternative. Each column ended with ways that each of us can make the critical distinction between the two. There was a balance scale in the image at the top of each of these two columns.
Rattner’s essay provides us with two views of 11 major economic issues that affect each of us, directly or indirectly. One view is Trump’s promise for a possible future outcome. The other view provides us with information on the status of this issue and the recent history leading up to it. As you go through the 11 pairs, how much does each view weigh, in your opinion? What does the scale say about them?
My second reason for recommending Rattner’s essay comes from personal experience, gathered from my career in science and education. Each chart in Rattner’s essay and the many charts I published in academic papers has a story of its own. The 11 economic charts came from government agencies like the Congressional Budget Office or private sector organizations like the Kaiser Family Foundation. The charts in my publications came from measurements I made on fossil specimens, or data assembled from other academic publications, or downloaded from public sources, like DNA sequences archived in NIH’s GenBank data repository.
Once I assembled this raw information, I had to decide how to test them for consistency so I could weed out any errors that had been made when they were first collected. Then I had to figure out how to display them to make analysis and interpretation possible. Finally, I prepared finished charts that were clear for the reader.
Academics know that the final test of their work could come from challenges from other researchers. Where did the data come from? How have they been changed in the process of preparing the article? How can I get access to the original sources so I can measure the same fossils?
Most scientific findings are never challenged in these ways, but scientific integrity is preserved by the standard practices of documentation. Rattner documented his sources with the captions under each chart. My charts pointed to lists of the museum identification codes on each of the fossils I measured. Any credible scientists could approach those museums and ask to see those specimens to verify my measurements.
This may remind you of law enforcement and the adversarial relationship in criminal and civil law. Evidence lockers are like the museums and data repositories that store the objects and data that may need to be seen in court.
This background explains why evidence has greater weight than conspiracy theories and other unproven possibilities, as discussed in my second column, referenced above.
I hope you can now go back and revisit your reading of Rattner’s 11 split-screens, and how you assessed the relative weights of promises and charts.
5 Responses
Thanks for this great essay and the links to the NYT’s article. Rather than illustrate Trump’s, and all Republicans’ Golden Age for America, it illustrates the nightmare he’s created for America. Just wait until 2027 when millions of Americans lose any health insurance. Things are getting worse.
The American people, Republican, Democrat or Independent, are being both kept from the reality of our current circumstances as well as mislead by the current Administration’s effort to deflect from the economic malaise unfolding around us. To paraphrase an author of an in-depth Trump biography, “everything he touches dies.”
I am a big fan of Steve Rattner. He has the ability to focus your attention on important issues by using his charts. The bottom line is the Trump Administration has dramatically failed in its first two years. My hope is that we can survive the final two years. Having the House (and maybe the Senate) controlled by a Democrat majority will go a long way towards making sure our great democracy continues.
There is a plethora of half-truths, innuendo, omissions, and outright lies coming from the media and social media on both sides of the aisle. What is true and not true is extremely difficult to discern. I assume that by now most folks know that their “news” feeds and social media feeds are fed by algorithms that send you more of what you spend the most time on. They give your inclinations affirmation rather than unbiased information.
I suggest that you be skeptical of EVERYTHING you read, hear, or see. Try to go to the original sources and gather the full context of what was actually said before reaching any conclusions.
It is extremely time consuming, but necessary if you want to be fully informed.
A new (to me, anyway) source of news is Ground News that shows you articles from L, R, and Center, ranks biases and factuality, and lets you read it all then make up your own mind without giving any opinion. It’s worth taking a look.
Thanks for this comment, Kent. As you said, skepticism and critical thinking are essential.
I’ll look into Ground News. Have you run across any issues where the articles from R, L, and C sources point to different primary sources? Knowing a fair amount about sampling and research techniques might be needed to judge which primary sources carry the most weight. On the other hand, if the different viewpoints all claim that the same primary source supports their policy preference, that would make interesting reading.
David