I had a simple math question in mind before I read Adam Serwer's "Trump's Followers Are Living in a Dark Fantasy," Atlantic issue. A portion of the article's subhead was "MAGA adherents deny and dismiss what they are a part of, but they believe Trump’s lies." Precisely what percentage of MAGA adherents genuinely believe his lies is an unanswered question. I can't prove it but I've always believed some vaguely significant swath of Trumpers know full well that he's a perpetual-motion mendacity machine, with one exception: He really is "fighting for them."
Well bless their hearts. Both P.T. Barnum and W.C. Fields popularized the name and birth timeline of those who believe anything Trump says. That led me this morning to finally answering the math question that had been occupying my mind over the past few days.
Merely one of the liar's lies is a twofer; that a) 21 million immigrants illegally crossed the southern border during the Biden administration, and b) he'll deport the whole lot of them. Keep in mind that millions of these millions cannot simply be pushed across the Rio Grande. Huge, vast, incalculable numbers of immigrants come from far away, mostly Central America (excluding Mexico), South America, the Caribbean and Africa.
Lord Deportation, therefore, would need to fly (for simplicity's sake) virtually all the 21 million undocumented residents of the United States out of the country and back to whence they came. That's a lot of people. And that number of people would require a lot of planes. Again for simplicity's sake, let's assume the U.S. had sufficient aircraft to do the job (which it doesn't), and that each plane could seat 200 of the Trumpian unwanted.
So, on to the math. Let's also assume that Trump, on Day One, decides to get really serious about this "mass deportation" business — so serious, he further decides he wants the job completed within a year. We'll work the math backward. To deport 21 million people in 365 days means flying 57,534 of them out of the country each day. And that means 2,397 people must depart every hour of every day.
Here's where Trump stumbles on what he'd undoubtedly call unbelievable luck. If one of those planes carrying 200 deported passengers took to the air every five minutes for 365 days, he could, in fact, deport all 21 million of the swarthily unwanted.
But here's where the really unbelievable luck comes in. Not only would he rid the United States of millions of valuable workers, without whom the economy would crash, he would also have room to spare — indeed, room enough to exile precisely 24,000 Democratic opponents, Never Trumpers, journalists, and a fair number of the extraordinarily disgruntled 50,000 dedicated career government employees he sacked in favor of loyalist lapdogs.
All this effort Trump would explain to the faithful as but a part of his "fighting for them." So it's possible that all those Trumpers who otherwise know he's a perpetual-motion mendacity machine would at least take his word for it that the mass deportations, thousands of illegal banishments and economy crashing were done in their name and for their good.
Or would they?