Around this time five years ago, Donald Trump’s White House team saw the epidemiological models that showed Covid claiming the lives of hundreds of thousands of Americans. But they didn’t like what the evidence told them, and the president preferred data that made him happy.
And so, as The Washington Post reported, a White House team, led by Kevin Hassett — an economist with no background in infectious diseases — “quietly built an econometric model to guide response operations.” That was unwise, and the model proved useless to the administration.
Soon after, Team Trump embraced a “cubic model” that told officials that Covid deaths would effectively disappear by mid-May 2020. Covid deaths, we now know, did not effectively disappear by mid-May 2020. (Hassett, the economist responsible for the “cubic model,” is now back in the White House, serving as the director of Trump’s National Economic Council.)
Roughly five years later, the Republican president is back in the Oval Office; he and his team are again mismanaging a crisis; and the whole operation is again trying and failing to concoct mathematical formulas. As my MSNBC colleague Hayes Brown summarized:
When President Donald Trump presented his sweeping global tariffs from the Rose Garden on Wednesday, even the most basic questions were left up in the air. At the top of the list: How did the White House derive the wildly disparate rates listed on the graphic Trump so proudly displayed? As global markets roiled in the aftermath of the announcement, the White House gave an answer about its calculations that was patently ridiculous.
Economic journalist James Surowiecki helped get the ball rolling on this, concluding that to arrive at Trump’s tariff rates, the White House simply “took our trade deficit with that country and divided it by the country’s exports to us” — a method Surowiecki described as “extraordinary nonsense.”
The White House pushed back, insisting in writing that officials actually relied on this formula:
The addition of Greek letters was likely intended to give the exercise an air of sophistication and academic veneer, but it wasn’t actually complicated at all, so much as it apparently designed to give the impression of being complicated.
Indeed, an NBC News report noted that the White House’s tariff calculation “seems more complicated than it is,” adding that the closer one looks at the formula, the more it proves that Surowiecki got it right: “The tariff rate for a certain country is equal to the trade deficit divided by the part we can tax, the imports, divided by two.”
The Washington Post’s Catherine Rampell noted via Bluesky that she was initially reluctant to amplify the argument that the administration’s tariff rates were based on a “dumb calculation,” but Team Trump ultimately confirmed the claims.
Rampell, a new MSNBC co-host, added that the formula is “nonsense.”








