Donald Trump did something trivial a few weeks ago that I can’t stop thinking about. He lied about a math test to a crowd of people. It’s completely unimportant, and yet I felt viscerally, personally offended by it. I think I’ve figured out why: partly because of the triviality, and partly because there were so many ways to do it more impressively, and his laziness/contempt for his audience prevented him from doing any of them. It reveals that his true thrill has always been to see what he could get away with, and not what he could accomplish.
Let me set the scene. He’s speaking to a crowd of people, and says that as a part of a cognitive test, he was asked to pick a random number. He claimed he picked 203. “Multiply times 9, divide by 2, add on 1324, subtract 1292. ‘Sir, multiply it out one more time by 19. What is the answer, sir?’ And I got it right.”
[Late night comedians and others have pointed out that this isn’t a part of the cognitive tests that we know doctors give, and that’s valid, but even if he somehow took this test, surely the audience realizes that he didn’t successfully solve this problem.]
I know this is unimportant, but let’s break down four ways that this fails.
1. It’s a bad marker of real intelligence/greatness. When I help jobseekers prepare for consulting interviews, one of the things we cover is multistep mental math. Candidates often worry about it a lot, but I reassure them that it’s one of the least important parts of the case interview, because on the job, we all use calculators and computers! Having some comfort with computations so that you can “sense check” an answer is good, but speed-calculation is a party trick. For the president of the United States in the year 2026, mental arithmetic would be even lower on my list of desirable skills, far below judgement of people, creative thinking, ability to think big picture and absorb new information. Even memorization of geography might be more relevant; at least that could tie to recognizing diplomacy.
2. It’s bad showmanship. But let’s suppose Mr. Trump believes mental math is a valid indicator of presidential greatness. If I wanted to demonstrate how good I was at math to an audience, I’d do it out loud! Build up the show! “Try it with me. Take 203... multiply by 9… who got 1827? Divide by 2, add 1324, and subtract 1292. You should have 935 and a half. Now multiply one more time by 19. Did anybody get it? 17,774.5. And I got it right on the first try.” Now, of course he could be accused of memorizing it, but that would at least take some effort (and given that he’s not known for sticking to scripts, I might give him the benefit of the doubt there). If he really wanted to put on the show (and had the ability), he could have someone in the audience shout out the first number. Is it carnivalesque? Sure. But at least it would show a real skill. Saying “I got it right” is the biggest cop-out imaginable, counting on his audience’s gullibility or goodwill to give him credit for an unproven claim.
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