Donald Trump has a fixation with numbers. He must get this trait from his uncle who taught at MIT. Trump claims his uncle had three university degrees “in nuclear, chemical, and math.”That’s a lie, of course. And it fits. And math? What? We surely know Trump failed his math courses. That’s because Trump’s obsession with numbers usually involves numbers he makes up, pulls out of thin air, and, well, lies about, just like he lies about his uncle.He doesn’t just lie about numbers. He remakes them as he sees fit, larger, smaller, higher, lower, more pleasing and flattering. He has a long history of making false or misleading statements about figures, consistently exaggerating numbers related to his achievements, support, and events.Throughout his life — and in the interest of brevity, let’s stick to his political career — Trump has treated data not as a collection of facts but as a tool for image-making. From the moment he was sworn in, he famously inflated his 2017 inauguration crowd size. Later, he compared the crowd that participated in the insurrection he provoked on January 6th to the historic crowds of the March on Washington in 1963.These weren’t just wildly false. They were insulting.And if you’re a glutton for lies and keep up with Trump’s fibs, you know the pattern extends to the economy, immigration, job numbers, gas prices and on and on. He routinely posts whoppers on Truth Social and delivers them during interviews, rallies, and even State of the Union speeches.He constantly claims “record-breaking” statistics, such as 20 million illegal border crossings or inheriting “record” inflation, even when the numbers are grossly exaggerated or the opposite is true.Former New Jersey Governor Chris Christie once explained Trump’s reliance on falsity: “Trump looked at my wife and said, whether it’s true or not, if I say it enough times, it becomes true… He takes what he knows is incorrect and convinces himself by saying it enough times.”This habitual distortion creates a phony version of leadership where popularity and success are measured by unadulterated nonsense rather than real results, i.e. electoral victory as a “landslide” or unfavorable approval ratings as “fake news.”Trump has established a perverse precedent where obvious facts become inconvenient. His reliance on fabricated numbers doesn’t just mislead supporters; it erodes the shared seriousness required for a functioning democracy.Alarmingly, we watched him do it six years ago with COVID. The question now, as his Iran war enters its third week and injuries and fatalities begin to mount, is whether we will watch him do it again.On Thursday, a second military evacuation flight landed at Ramstein Air Base carrying roughly 19 more wounded American troops, including two injured in a drone attack whose details the Pentagon has declined to fully disclose. This follows about 20 who arrived days earlier. The official Pentagon tally now sits at roughly 140 injured and 13 dead.Some of those numbers reached the public through leaks, not through clear, direct briefings from the equally fact-challenged Pete Hegseth.When wartime casualty data has to escape through back channels to reach the American public, you don’t need a history degree to understand what’s happening. You just need a memory.During the Vietnam War, the Johnson administration manipulated, obscured, and downplayed U.S. involvement and casualties to manage public opinion and conceal the lack of progress.Trump has traversed this dubious road before. In the spring of 2020, he suggested that COVID case counts could be reduced simply by doing less testing.“When you do testing to that extent, you’re going to find more people, you’re going to find more cases,” he said. “So I said to my people, ‘Slow the testing down, please.’” The White House said it was a joke. It wasn’t. And if it was, these are people’s lives we are talking about.He pressured the CDC. He slow-walked reporting. He feuded publicly with his own health officials when their projections made him look bad. He even tried to keep cruise ships away from U.S. shores so that the infected passengers wouldn’t raise the ominous COVID numbers.He turned the routine act of counting the dead into a political liability to be managed rather than a solemn obligation to be honored. By the time it was over, the United States had one of the highest COVID death tolls in the developed world.Now here we are again.The Iran war is just over two weeks old. It has already cost American taxpayers more than $11 billion in its first week alone. Gas prices are rising by the day. A military refueling plane crashed, and the administration was remarkably quick, suspiciously quick, to distance the incident from enemy fire.Meanwhile, the White House communications operation has been running this conflict like a winter blockbuster, complete with NFL-style highlight reels and video game-style footage. It’s disgusting. War is not a game. It is deadly. People are maimed.