A recent NY Times (August 18th, 2026) carried a Guest Essay, “Trump’s Broken Promises, in 11 Charts” by Steven Rattner. He’s an NYT contributing opinion writer and a former counselor to President Obama’s Treasury Secretary. The essay is a series of 11 short sections, each a kind of split-screen that juxtaposed a promise that candidate Trump made concerning the U.S. economy in 2024 or 2025, followed by a chart with economic data for years leading up to the present. Each promise is presented in quotes with the place and date he made the promise, and the source of each chart is provided below each one.
I’ve neither studied nor practiced economics, so I’m not bringing Rattner’s essay to your attention to discuss the promise or the evidence showing that, to date, these promises have not been kept.
I hope that economists who read the Spy will offer their views on the believability of the charts and their relevance to the promises. Alongside my desire to stimulate an exchange of reader comments, I have two other reasons for bringing this essay to your attention.
Several of my columns have focused on the distinction between the things we know to be true and other things that we believe or suspect may be true. Two columns in particular, Prove It, and The Great Asymmetry, explored the general problem of distinguishing truth from things that may, or may not be true. We may believe them to be true so deeply that we forget they are just possibilities, or we may suspect them to be true because we don’t like the alternative. Each column ended with ways that each of us can make the critical distinction between the two. There was a balance scale in the image at the top of each of these two columns.
Rattner’s essay provides us with two views of 11 major economic issues that affect each of us, directly or indirectly. One view is Trump’s promise for a possible future outcome. The other view provides us with information on the status of this issue and the recent history leading up to it. As you go through the 11 pairs, how much does each view weigh, in your opinion? What does the scale say about them?
My second reason for recommending Rattner’s essay comes from personal experience, gathered from my career in science and education. Each chart in Rattner’s essay and the many charts I published in academic papers has a story of its own. The 11 economic charts came from government agencies like the Congressional Budget Office or private sector organizations like the Kaiser Family Foundation. The charts in my publications came from measurements I made on fossil specimens, or data assembled from other academic publications, or downloaded from public sources, like DNA sequences archived in NIH’s GenBank data repository.
Once I assembled this raw information, I had to decide how to test them for consistency so I could weed out any errors that had been made when they were first collected. Then I had to figure out how to display them to make analysis and interpretation possible. Finally, I prepared finished charts that were clear for the reader.
Academics know that the final test of their work could come from challenges from other researchers. Where did the data come from? How have they been changed in the process of preparing the article? How can I get access to the original sources so I can measure the same fossils?
Most scientific findings are never challenged in these ways, but scientific integrity is preserved by the standard practices of documentation. Rattner documented his sources with the captions under each chart. My charts pointed to lists of the museum identification codes on each of the fossils I measured. Any credible scientists could approach those museums and ask to see those specimens to verify my measurements.
This may remind you of law enforcement and the adversarial relationship in criminal and civil law. Evidence lockers are like the museums and data repositories that store the objects and data that may need to be seen in court.
This background explains why evidence has greater weight than conspiracy theories and other unproven possibilities, as discussed in my second column, referenced above.
I hope you can now go back and revisit your reading of Rattner’s 11 split-screens, and how you assessed the relative weights of promises and charts.
