Members of the Democratic Socialists of America have recently seemed ill-prepared when pressed on stances during primetime appearances, Washington Examiner columnist Joe Concha said on Fox News. “When you talk about abolishing the police…
Page F1From§Eachthe early bird edition — 31 August 2026
Examiner mocks socialists' 'bad math'; Trump's secret deals cut global health aid, risking preventable deaths.
As it ran on the front
The Washington Examiner ran an item this week describing socialist candidates as facing 'reality and bad math' when pressed on their numbers. Common Dreams ran an item the same week describing secret Trump administration deals that cut health aid to the Global South, a cut the underlying report says will inflict preventable death and disease. This office filed both documents in the same drawer, because they arrived filed under the same subject: arithmetic.
We ran the two ledgers side by side. One side of the drawer contains a set of policy proposals that a columnist has characterized as mathematically unrealistic; no dollar figure accompanies the characterization in the piece as filed. The other side of the drawer contains a set of signed agreements, described as secret, that remove funding from health programs serving people who, per the same report, will experience disease and death that the funding was preventing. That side of the drawer has a dollar figure. It has a body count, described by the report's own word as 'preventable.'…
…(cont) This office does not adjudicate which math is worse. It notes only that the word 'math' appears in the headline attached to the group with no receipts, and does not appear in the headline attached to the group with the receipts. That is a filing observation, not an accusation. Filing observations are what this desk does.
A household budget, hon, is bad math when the number does not add up to the outcome you were promised. A foreign aid program cut in secret, producing outcomes a report calls preventable, is also, by the same definition, bad math — it simply runs the deficit in a column that does not appear on anyone's campaign flyer. The gap between the two stories is not a gap in arithmetic. It is a gap in who gets called bad at it.
In lieu of further comment, this office recommends readers request the itemized cost of the 'preventable' deaths referenced in the report, in the same units — dollars, cases, dates — that were requested of the candidates called bad at math. The units are available. Someone simply has not been asked to produce them yet.
“They call the guy proposing paid leave 'bad at math' and bury, three headlines down, that their own secret deals are going to kill people from a disease that funding used to prevent. That's the math they don't want run out loud — cruelty with a rounding error.”
“The aid restructuring is a routine budget efficiency measure, it's not accurate to call it a cu— it is technically a reduction, but 'cut' implies malice, and this was, by all accounts, an efficiency review, conducted quietly for reasons of process, not politics.”
The receipts
The US Congress has pushed back against President Donald Trump's efforts to slash foreign aid, which has long been supported by Democrats and Republicans alike—but a new report on more than a dozen Memoranda of Understanding that the White…
This page is a back-issue: the story as it ran, receipts as they were. The current edition is at the front.