‘Incredibly stupid’: Nate Silver blasts a hole in Trump admin’s nonsensical tariff math
If you want to bamboozle people, resorting to complex technical language is the best way to do it. Oh no, I’m not drinking a glass of water, I’m choosing to undergo glutition of hydrogen monoxide via a heat-molded non-crystalline amorphous solid!
That seems to be the Trump administration‘s go-to solution when it comes to explaining their “Liberation Day” global tariffs, which have been applied so haphazardly that the United States is now fiercely applying economic pressure to an island inhabited only by penguins. To counter this and prove they actually are super intelligent after all, deputy press secretary Kush Desai came up with this:
This is incorrect.https://t.co/GiWRU6gJDv https://t.co/Kv9540tMxz pic.twitter.com/ZXP5gwZHgv
— Kush Desai (@KushDesai47) April 3, 2025
Ah, so it’s like that, huh. I understand everything now (doesn’t get it at all). To be fair, the Trump press team’s strategy of bewildering voters with incomprehensible Greek formulae is pretty sneaky. After all, if just under half of all Americans are considered “partially illiterate”, they’re going to have no chance of understanding what Desai is talking about here.
But Nate Silver has seen right through this, saying it’s an “incredibly stupid claim” covered up “by using Greek symbols”:
The White House is basically woke now, this is like every dumbass academic paper where they make some incredibly stupid claim but cover it up by using Greek symbols. https://t.co/C6Zn5XwmJE
— Nate Silver (@NateSilver538) April 3, 2025
The mathematically minded have leapt in to inform Desai, “You are a moron”, “there’s still time to delete this bro”, “this is hilarious” and, more pointedly, “we are cooked”. Given the confusing and random nature of these tariffs, it’s even being theorized that the Trump admin simply asked ChatGPT what to do and followed its instructions:
This might be the first large-scale application of AI technology to geopolitics.. 4o, o3 high, Gemini 2.5 pro, Claude 3.7, Grok all give the same answer to the question on how to impose tariffs easily. pic.twitter.com/r1GGubcz8c
— rohit (@krishnanrohit) April 3, 2025
A chaotic White House randomly tossing bombs into the global economic system would be worrying at the best of times. But when they’re either hiding their thinking through intentionally confusing math or just letting ChatGPT do their homework, it’s time to worry. Then again, given a choice between ChatGPT as president or Donald Trump, it’s difficult to argue that the AI isn’t going to be smarter, more balanced, and make more logical calls…
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