Beware of Absolutes

   The president tried to claim "the biggest electoral college win since Ronald Reagan." This came during an open press conference Thursday at the White House. In December, he claimed he had  scored "one of the largest electoral vote margins in history" during a television interview.
  It didn't take long for fact-checkers to point out that all but one of the other presidential winners since Reagan had larger margins than Donald Trump's 74 vote win over Hillary Clinton. Reagan defeated Walter Mondale by a margin of 512 electoral votes.
   That one victor with a smaller margin was George W. Bush who won by a five-vote margin over Al Gore, and by a 35-vote margin over John Kerry. Even by total electoral vote count, the rankings don't change.
   Other winners with larger margins were George H.W. Bush of Michael Dukakis, by 315 votes; Bill Clinton over Bush by 212 electoral votes; Clinton over Bob Dole by 220 votes; Barack Obama over John McCain by 192 electoral votes; and Obama over Mitt Romney by 126 electoral votes.
   Nevertheless, Trump resorts to superlative adjectives to describe nearly everything he does. Some of his favorites are wonderful, beautiful, marvelous, very very important, incredible, tremendous, outstanding, terrific, and absolutely catastrophic. Other negative adjectives common in his speech include sad, disgraceful, shameful, stupid, weak, disgusting, dishonest, horrible, sad, disaster and very very unfair.
   The problem is that despite all the adjectives, there are seldom any specifics as to why or how some person or thing is what it is.
   And often, numbers are thrown out that have little or no basis in fact or reality and are defended as something "a lot of people are talking about," or "just a number I've heard." This last description was applied to the federal circuit court that rejected his executive order banning or limiting immigration, especially by Muslims. That court, Trump claimed, "is in chaos and turmoil," and "its decisions are overturned 80 percent of the time," adding, "That's just a number I've heard."
   As if passing something off as gossip excuses the president of the United States of America from offering evidence or proof of an accusation.
   When it comes to his claim that "I inherited a mess" in everything from national economics to global affairs when he took office, a quick look a hard data shows that the stock market is at an all-time high, the unemployment rate is half what it was and output has been rising steadily since the Great Recession of eight years ago.
   Beware of absolutes. When someone promises that "things are gonna be great," it's up to others to ask how that will be done.
   But the most dangerous signal to come out of the president's news conference today was his warning that ISIS, the militant extremist groups, "has spread like cancer," coupled with his plan for "a massive rebuilding of the military" along with the "hope we never have to use it."
   And while he pushes for major increases in military spending, he also wants to cut taxes and inaugurate major regulatory reform to benefit big corporations.
   Then the question becomes, who's going to pay for all this, if the economy is in the dire straits that he warns of?