Trump Holds Up a Chart on Fox
News That Shows He’s Lying,
Then Lies About What It Says
Robert Mackey
July 20 2020, 11:58 a.m.
The whole pathology of Donald Trump’s presidency — his inability
to accept facts that are not flattering to him, his resort to lying to
cover up his mismanagement of the federal government, his staff’s
desperate efforts to manufacture evidence to help him mislead the
country and the conservative media’s role in enabling all of this —
was on full display in just one 63-second exchange with the Fox
News anchor Chris Wallace broadcast on Sunday.
Less than two minutes into the interview, Wallace confronted Trump
with a damning statistic about his failure to contain the Covid-19
pandemic, relative to other nations. “We have the seventh-highest
mortality rate in the world,” Wallace noted, accurately. “Our
mortality rate is higher than Brazil, it’s higher than Russia and the
European Union has us on a travel ban.”
As I explained last week, Trump has spent the past three months
trying to disguise his failure to keep Americans from dying of Covid-
19 by telling the same lie: that the per capita death toll in the United
States, known as the mortality rate, is among the lowest in the
world. As of Friday, the day Wallace sat down with Trump, there
were indeed just six countries in the world with more than 100,000
citizens that had more per capita deaths than the U.S. according to
the Johns Hopkins Coronavirus Resource Center. (Over the
weekend, Chile moved up the rankings, so the U.S. currently has the
eighth-highest mortality rate in the world, excluding the tiny states
of San Marino and Andorra.)
A table of the nations with the highest number of deaths per capita from Covid-19 on
July 19.
Trump, however, refused to let Wallace’s completely accurate
statement go unchallenged by alternative facts. “When you talk
about mortality rates, I think it’s the opposite,” he said. “I think we
have one of the lowest mortality rates in the world.”
When Wallace replied, “That’s not true, sir,” Trump demanded that
his press secretary, Kayleigh McEnany, produce the misleading
chart she has been using to try to prove, through sleight-of-hand,
that the seventh-worst mortality rate in the world is really something
to be proud of.
“Can you please get me the mortality rate?” Trump asked.
“Kayleigh’s right here,” he explained to Wallace. “I heard we have
one of the lowest, maybe the lowest mortality rate anywhere in the
world,” he added. “Do you have the numbers, please?” he asked
McEnany. “Because I heard we had the best mortality rate.”
The president’s reference to an important metric, the percentage of
his population that has been lost to the pandemic so far, as
something he vaguely “heard” somewhere was not exactly
reassuring.
At that point, McEnany stepped into frame and handed the
president a chart. She was not wearing a microphone, but appeared
to say: “This is the case fate– deaths in all these different eight
countries, as Dr. Birx points out.”
The reference to Dr. Deborah Birx, the White House coronavirus
response coordinator, suggested that the chart McEnany handed to
Trump had come from his closest medical advisor on the pandemic.
It was Birx who had first focused attention on the Covid-19 mortality
rate in mid-April, when she stood next to Trump in the White House
briefing room and presented a bar chart that showed that six
European nations had higher per capita death rates from the
disease than the U.S. at that point.
Trump glanced at the chart quickly, realized that it was upside
down, and then displayed it for a fraction of a second before
pronouncing, falsely, that it was proof that the U.S. had the “number
one low mortality rate.” The chart, however, proved nothing of the
kind.
That’s because it was not a measure of global mortality rates at all.
It was, as the title visible in a freeze-frame showed, a chart looking
at an entirely different metric: the “Case Fatality Rate of Covid-19.”
President Donald Trump showed Fox News a chart comparing the case-fatality rate of
Covid-19 in the U.S. to six other nations and lied about what it meant.
Photo: Fox News via YouTube
While the mortality rate is a straight-forward measure of how many
citizens per capita have died from a disease, the case-fatality rate is
something entirely different: the ratio between deaths from a
disease and the total number of confirmed cases.
As the number of confirmed cases of Covid-19 in the U.S. has
skyrocketed, the nation’s case-fatality rate has indeed gone down,
to just 3.8 percent, but that number is still higher than in dozens of
other countries. It is also essentially meaningless, since nations are
testing at different rates and researchers warn that the case-fatality
rate is unknowable until after a pandemic ends, when the full death
toll is known. In the meantime, it is a misleading way of measuring
the lethality of a disease unless an entire population has been
tested for it.
In recent weeks, at least two Trump aides, McEnany and Alyssa
Farah, the White House director of strategic communications, have
claimed incorrectly that a chart showing the U.S. case-fatality rate
declining means that “our mortality rate is going down.”
According to a version of the chart Trump held up that was
displayed on-screen by Fox News later, the White House had
created it using a tool on the University of Oxford’s Our World in
Data website to compare the U.S. case-fatality rate to that of the
global average and six other nations: Italy, Spain, Germany, Brazil,
South Korea and Iceland. A note on the chart from the Oxford
researchers warns against assigning too much importance to the
metric. “During an outbreak of a pandemic,” the warning reads, “the
CFR is a poor measure of the mortality risk of the disease.”
A chart used by the White House to justify the president’s claim that the U.S. mortality
rate is low offers no information on that subject.
Photo: Fox News via YouTube
What the chart showed was that the U.S. ratio of deaths to cases on
Friday was squarely in the middle of those selected countries: lower
than Italy, Spain and Germany, but higher than Brazil, South Korea
and Iceland. In other words, the chart Trump held up as proof that
the U.S. had the lowest mortality rate in the world included no
information about per capita mortality at all, and merely showed that
the U.S. had a lower case-fatality rate than three randomly selected
countries, and so was not “number one” in that category either.
The comparison of the U.S. case-fatality rate to that of Germany
helps explain how irrelevant the statistic is, since there is no doubt
which country is handling the pandemic better. While the U.S. has a
case-fatality rate of 3.8 percent, compared to Germany’s 4.5
percent, America’s mortality rate of 428 deaths per million citizens
is nearly four times higher than Germany’s of 110 per million.
As the U.S. exceeded 140,000 dead on Sunday, Germany, which has
about one quarter the population of the U.S. has suffered 9,091
deaths. What this means is that more than 100,000 Americans who
have died of Covid-19 this year would still be alive today had the
federal government in Washington had been as successful as the
one in Berlin.
While Trump misleads Americans about the U.S. mortality rate, just
359 new cases of Covid-19 are being diagnosed each day in
Germany, and deaths there are down to an average of five a day.
The U.S. by contrast is currently discovering an average of 63,281
new cases each day, and losing 756 lives.
Read Our Complete CoverageThe
Coronavirus Crisis While he was bluffing Wallace
about what was the piece of
paper he flashed for the camera, Trump pressed the Fox anchor to
make sure he included it in his broadcast, “because it shows what
fake news is all about.”
When Wallace replied that Fox would “put our stats on,” Trump
erupted. “You said we had the worst mortality rate in the world and
we have the best!” he complained.
When the interview was broadcast, Fox briefly cut away from the
exchange at that point to fact-check the issue. Unfortunately,
Wallace and his producers made a complete mess of that, by also
confusing the Covid-19 mortality rate with the case-fatality rate. So,
as the Fox anchor presented what he said was, “the mortality rate
for 20 countries hit by the virus,” the image on-screen was a chart
from the Johns Hopkins coronavirus website showing case-fatality
rates instead.
A screenshot from Fox News showing a chart of case-fatality rates for the 20 countries
currently most affected by Covid-19.
Photo: Fox News via YouTube
That data showed, Wallace said, that “the U.S. ranked seventh —
better than the United Kingdom, but worse than Brazil and Russia.”
This statement, echoing what he had said at the start of his
interview with Trump, suggests that the anchor, like the president,
had gone into the taping with no idea that the per capita mortality
rate and the case-fatality rate are completely different things.