Donald Trump is a leader. This means he does not listen to petty things like the facts. He simply tells the facts what they'll be and they'll play along if they know what's good for them. It is the Fox News model. It is the Breitbart "news" model. It is the James O'Keefe video playtime fun model. Trump has taken the reins of a party now fully invested in declaring that facts other than the ones they prefer are a conspiracy by liberals, foreigners, or scientists, and Trump has risen to the top by feeding whatever conspiracy they want to hear.
On "Fox News Sunday," host Chris Wallace said there are 1.6 billion Muslims in the world and, according to the best experts, at most, 100,000 people are fighting for Jihadist causes. [...]
Trump said whoever did that survey was "about as wrong as you can get."
Those experts are losers. Here, let Donald Trump preach the new numbers at you.
You're saying that out of 1.5 billion, 100,000, right -- let me tell you, whoever did that survey was about as wrong as you can get. It's 27 percent, could be 35 percent, would go to war, would -- the hatred is tremendous, Chris. [...]
Why don’t you -- why don't you take a look at the Pew poll that came out very recently or fairly recently, where I think the number -- I mean, I could be corrected, it's whatever it is it is -- but it's something like 27 percent are, you know, really very militant about going after things.
Hmm. Just where might that "Pew poll" Donald is referring to be squirreled away?
We have some decent information on what Muslims throughout the world believe, achieved via the time-honored tradition of just asking them, and like adherents to all the other world's religions the overall numbers of would-be radicals are tiny. The most recent Pew poll on Muslims worldwide in fact confirms these numbers, and has no apparent fodder for the Donald Trumps of the world to claim a third-ish of one of the world's major religions consist of people who you should be terrified of.
So Trump's claim is nonsensical, as his claims so very often are. First he had asserted that all Muslims hate us; now it's down to "27 percent" or "35 percent"—damn fine progress for a week's worth of work. But where does that "27 percent" even come from, in Donald's head, such that he would have it at the (sort of) ready? Hmm.
There is one recent place in "Pew polls" about Muslims where a 27 percent number appears; according to Pew, that's the percent of conservatives and moderate voters who feel the next president should "speak bluntly" of Islam, even if that means criticizing the religion "as a whole." In other words, 27 percent of America's conservative and moderate voters are of the opinion that we should be criticizing Islam as radical, no matter what Muslims themselves think. That's the number of non-liberal Americans who are radicalized toward Muslims, not the number of Muslims radicalized toward Americans.
Now, maybe we’re reading too much into this. But it seems highly likely that Donald Trump probably spends more time looking at polls of what conservatives think "the next president" should be saying rather than polls of what the actual-factual facts of the world are, so I prefer to believe that Trump got confused between the things he was supposed to say and the poll numbers suggesting why he should say them.
That said, on the very same day Donald Trump appeared on one of the other Sunday "news" shows and proceeded to lie his gilded ass off about a videotape while host Chuck Todd was playing that self-same videotape onscreen at the time so that Trump could see, realtime, that the thing he was bullshitting about did not play out in the bullshitty way he was claiming. So we may still be giving Trump too much credit for wondering where he got the "poll" numbers he comes up with. He may just choose them based on what numbers sound the best when burping them.