With that in mind, Donald Trump apparently decided it was time to exaggerate the cost of the shutdown — a lot. In an item published to his social media platform, the president argued: “The Democrats cost our Country $1.5 Trillion Dollars with their recent antics of viciously closing our Country.”

That was, by any responsible metric, bonkers. Trump appears to have taken a credible number and, on a whim, started adding zeroes so that he could use the word “trillion.”

As it happens, it’s a word he struggles with all the time. Take this week, for example.

On Monday, the president wrote online that he’s expecting tariff revenue to be “in excess of $2 Trillion Dollars.” A day later, he published another missive in which he boasted about tariff revenue “in excess of 3 Trillion Dollars.”

Both figures were spectacularly wrong, but more important was the question hanging overhead: How did the total go from $2 trillion to $3 trillion in the span of one day?......

If you’re thinking that the president just likes to say the word “trillion” without any meaningful connection to reality, you’re not alone.

To be sure, Trump has struggled with the basics of arithmetic for quite some time. We are, after all, talking about a president who thinks it’s possible to lower the cost of prescription drugs “by 1,500%,” as if pharmaceutical companies are prepared to start paying consumers to take free medications.

But Trump is actually offering the public an important lesson: He doesn’t use numbers and statistics like an adult; he uses numbers and statistics that he thinks sound good and make him feel better.