Nicolai Haugsted
Trump’s biggest numbers fall apart under scrutiny after sweeping Time interview.
Donald Trump has never been shy about putting a number on his success.
Crowds, elections, television audiences and approval ratings have all provided fertile territory for the president’s fondness for statistics, particularly when those statistics make his political performance look impressive.
His sprawling September 28 interview with Time offered plenty more.
Time subsequently examined 12 claims from the conversation, and several of Trump’s biggest numbers ran into an awkward problem: publicly available data told a very different story.
Perhaps the most striking example concerned the election that returned him to the White House.
Trump turns 49.8 percent into 86 percent
Talking about his 2024 victory over Kamala Harris, Trump offered a remarkably large figure.
“I won 86% popular vote,” Trump said, according to Time.
Official election results do not come remotely close to that number.
Federal Election Commission results show Trump received 49.80 percent of the nationwide popular vote, compared with 48.32 percent for Harris.
Trump did win the Electoral College comfortably, taking 312 electoral votes against Harris’ 226.
That produced a difference of exactly 86 electoral votes.
“He’s conflating two figures,” Time concluded.
Trump therefore had an 86 connected to his election victory. It just was not 86 percent of the popular vote.
A 99 percent poll that Time could not find
Israel provided another enormous number during the interview.
Trump has repeatedly emphasized his relationship with the country and argued that Israelis strongly support him.
“We’re popular [in Israel], like 99%,” Trump told Time.
Time’s fact-checkers went looking for polling to support the figure.
“A poll showing a 99% approval rating for Trump among Israelis does not exist,” the magazine reported.
Available polling does show that Trump enjoys considerably stronger support in Israel than he does across many other countries — just nowhere near 99 percent.
Pew Research Center surveyed adults across 36 countries between February and May and found that 66 percent of Israelis had confidence in Trump to do the right thing regarding world affairs. Israel was among the countries where Trump received his strongest ratings.
Political and ethnic differences inside Israel were substantial. Pew found confidence in Trump among Israeli Jews at 79 percent, compared with just 13 percent among Israeli Arabs.
Strong support, then.
Practically unanimous support, no.
Then came the 107 million viewers
Trump also supplied Time with a spectacular television number.
His September speech at the Republican midterm convention, he claimed, attracted 107 million views and even outperformed the NFL’s season opener.
Time checked that one too.
“The Facts: the ratings tell a different story,” its fact-checkers wrote.
Nielsen figures cited by Time showed Trump’s roughly two-hour speech averaged about 2.5 million viewers on Fox News, which carried the address exclusively.
NBC, meanwhile, reported an average audience of 25.1 million for the NFL game Trump invoked as a comparison.
Those figures do not necessarily measure every possible online view, clip or social-media impression associated with the speech. They do, however, contradict a straightforward comparison suggesting Trump’s televised audience surpassed the football broadcast.
