Trump’s claim about Beto’s rally: “He has 200 people, 300 people.”
The facts: “Estimates from O’Rourke’s anti-border wall protest show that 7,000 to 8,000 people attended his rally. Some other reports put attendance as high as 10,000 to 15,000.”
Trump’s claim about his own rally: “The arena holds 8,000. And thank you, Fire Department. They got in about 10,000. Thank you, Fire Department. Appreciate it.”
The Fire Department: “Fire Department spokesman Enrique Aguilar told the El Paso Times on Monday that Trump did not receive permission to exceed the limit and that there were 6,500 people inside the building during the president’s rally.”
No wonder he doesn’t want us to see his tax returns! Not a big numbers guy.
In some degree to fairness to Trump, he’s probably not much worse at numbers than most other politicians. I have to say that I never once saw any of our campus activists, right or left, YAF or SDS, in a non-required math class. They were not big on classes where you couldn’t assert your superior solution by shouting down the opposition.
And it’s not just a right-wing phenomenon. Remember that Elizabeth Warren claimed that the number of Americans incarcerated for low-level marijuana offenses was greater than the number locked up for all violent crimes! That claim was even more ridiculous than Trump’s boasts about his crowd sizes. The numbers are not even vaguely comparable.
* In the federal prisons, of the approximately 180,000 prisoners, only about 250 are there for drug possession, and only about 12% of those involve marijuana. That means about 30 people in the entire vast expanse of the United States. Of course that is 30 too many, but those 30 are a drop in the bucket compared to the inmates who were convicted of violent crimes.
* In the state prisons, about 3.4% of all prisoners are in for drug possession – of any kind of drug, not just reefer. Assuming the same ratio as the Feds (marijuana possession offenders as a percentage of all of possession offenders), that means about 5000 people are incarcerated for marijuana possession in a total prison population of more than a million. It is regrettable that we have imprisoned more than five thousand people for possession of some doobie. If I were the president, I’d pardon them all. But again – that is an insignificant group beside the violent offenders (some 700,000).