Once upon a time, before everything else happened, Donald Trump’s defining obsession could be measured in billions. Whether the billions were real never seemed to matter much.
“Donald’s verbal billions were always a topic of conversation whenever we visited,” Timothy O’Brien writes in his 2005 biography TrumpNation: The Art of Being the Donald. He describes how Trump would pluck ever-larger 10-digit numbers out of the air when taking about personal wealth.
Peter Newcomb, a veteran editor of the Forbes 400 rich list, told O’Brien that Trump “constantly calls about himself and says we’re not only low, but low by a multiple.” It wasn’t just that the magazine attached a dollar value to individual achievement, but that its staff lacked the time to run deep audits on its subjects, so could be lobbied effectively, he writes. The Forbes 400 was a malleable benchmark ideal for a bullshit billionaire.
Now that Trump projects his idiosyncrasies and fragilities on to the western world, his game of bullshit billionaire bingo has gone macro. Winning the approval of the US administration is as simple as showing Trump a big number. He remains impressed to the point of obsession by big numbers. And, because empathy is not one of Trump’s strengths, he believes everyone else will be too.
It worked in late 2016, when Masa Son made a splash by announcing with the president-elect that SoftBank would invest $50bn in the US over the following four years. (About half the pledged cash went into WeWork.)
For Trump’s second term Masa repeated the gambit but added a zero. SoftBank is a lead partner on the Stargate datacentre project announced on January 21:
The Stargate Project is a new company which intends to invest $500 billion over the next four years building new AI infrastructure for OpenAI in the United States.
Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman tried one-upmanship a few days later, telling Trump during their “congratulations on your inauguration” phone call that the Kingdom plans $600bn in US investments over the next four years.
Apple this week put a familiar-looking figure on its nearshoring plan:
Apple today announced its largest-ever spend commitment, with plans to spend and invest more than $500 billion in the U.S. over the next four years. This new pledge builds on Apple’s long history of investing in American innovation and advanced high-skilled manufacturing, and will support a wide range of initiatives that focus on artificial intelligence, silicon engineering, and skills development for students and workers across the country.
“We are bullish on the future of American innovation, and we’re proud to build on our long-standing U.S. investments with this $500 billion commitment to our country’s future,” said Tim Cook, Apple’s CEO.
Meanwhile, over in territorial statecraft, Trump’s team has been pulling on the same string:
US officials presented Kyiv last week with a plan to channel up to $500bn in proceeds from resource extraction into a fund that would be 100 per cent owned by the US. Trump has described the plan as repayment for previous US military aid.
Ditto Elon Musk. When pitching the Department of Government Efficiency to the WSJ-subscribing public via an op-ed in November, Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy picked a cost-saving target that you’ve probably already guessed:
DOGE will help end federal overspending by taking aim at the $500 billion plus in annual federal expenditures that are unauthorized by Congress or being used in ways that Congress never intended
Why $500bn? What makes that number so compelling?
Why we prefer round numbers for everything from state budgets to medicine dosing is a matter of debate among psychologists. The choice overload that comes with precision tends to get the blame, even though broad-based evidence is weak. Some of the confounding factors might apply to a 78-year-old POTUS, however. A person is more likely to seek the comfort of a round number when required to make a lot of decisions quickly about things they don’t really understand, for instance.
There’s also numerical cognition. Studies show the average human brain is optimised for the amounts it encounters regularly, so will struggle badly with anything above a few hundred. We can grasp intuitively the difference between $10 and $50, but have to pause when asked about the difference between $10mn and $50mn. Conceptualising big numbers in anything other than abstract terms is a luxury reserved for the 0.1 per cent.
And the bigger the number, the more likely a person will fall back on approximate quantities where terms like “million” and “billion” are category markers. The bigger the number, the more likely its difference to a smaller number will be underestimated.
Here’s a neat experiment that asked people to place numbers on a line that goes up to a billion. Most people put a million in the middle, “as though they believed that the number words ‘thousand, million, billion, trillion’ constitute a uniformly spaced count list,” its authors write.
Trump approaches policy announcement in the same way he approached the Forbes 400. For a number to register with the public as being significantly bigger than the last one, it has to be a multiple. So, much like Trump’s lobbying of Forbes routinely multiplied his measurable wealth by 10, SoftBank’s $50bn investment for his first term becomes $500bn for his second. It’s nearly impossible for anyone to contemplate a trillion, but they can still appreciate that half of one is a lot.
None of it matters overly, at least judging by what happened under the first presidency, The average quarterly volume of gross private domestic investment — one of the broadest measures of it in the economic calculus — did rise from $3.11tn under Obama’s last term to $3.7tn under Trump. But it jumped to $4.8tn under Joe Biden’s presidency.
The trend in incomprehensibly big numbers is up irrespective of whether the person in charge wants it press-released, which suggests Trump’s love of $500bn is just another piece of Kayfabe. His ear has always been tuned to whatever bullshit the public will understand.
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