This installment has a through-line, and it’s a specific kind of error. Not a made-up figure. A true figure, carried out of the document it came from and set down next to a noun that changes what it means. Sixty trees became sixty cherry trees. A campaign promise became a crime. A proposal became a vote. A probability became a prediction. The numbers all check. The sentences don’t.
The sixty cherry trees
The claim, everywhere for a week: the Trump administration cut down sixty cherry blossom trees in Washington to build a golf course.
What happened when it was checked. The Washington Post reported that about sixty trees were removed from East Potomac Park, in what the Department of the Interior called routine maintenance. The Post article mentions one cherry tree. One. An advocacy group opposed to changes at the park told FactCheck.org it knew for certain of one cherry tree being cut, and no more.
What was true underneath. Sixty trees came down. The species that made it a story, the one that turns a maintenance crew into a desecration, is documented in exactly one case. The sixty is real. The cherry is a rounding error that happened to be the entire point. If you want to be angry about East Potomac Park, be angry about the fifty-nine trees nobody bothered to identify, because that’s the actual story and nobody told it.