Donald Trump Jr.'s terrorist-Skittle analogy is completely wrong
Let’s do some Skittle math!
The image posted by Trump pictures a small bowl containing perhaps 100 Skittles. Assuming that three of said Skittles could kill you, eating a handful from this tiny bowl would, indeed, be risky.
Here’s the thing, though: The image drastically oversells the "risk" posed by these Skittles (read: refugees).
A report released last week by the
Cato Institute measured the risk to Americans posed by refugees. The report found that an American’s chances of being killed by a refugee in a terrorist attack in any given year are 1 in 3.64 billion
. America’s murder rate — at
4.5 per 100,000 capita — is about 163,800 times higher.
As the Washington Post’s
Philip Bump points out, adhering to Trump’s analogy, a bowl with three deadly Skittles (refugees) in it would need to contain 10.93 billion Skittles. Bump calculated this to be the equivalent of
1.5 Olympic-size swimming pools full of the candy. This would equate to a bowl of Skittles roughly 246 feet long, 123 feet high, and 9 feet deep.
Below, Vox graphics editor Javier Zarracina has depicted what that bowl would look like. Donald Trump Jr. (6-foot-1) is included for scale, along with the original bowl in his tweet.
And just for fun, here is what this gargantuan bowl of Skittles would look next to Washington, DC’s (yuuuuge) Trump International Hotel:
According to Bump’s
analysis, Wrigley produces
200 million Skittles a day. It would take the company 54 days to produce the number of Skittles necessary to fill this bowl — and only three would pose a risk.
Or you could think of it this way: You’d have to go through 202,407,407 bags of Skittles (each of which contains about
54 candies) in order to find the three individual pieces that are contaminated.
Trump’s tweet, much like the rhetoric of his father, insinuates that inviting refugees to the United States is a deadly risk not worth taking. But that risk, in reality, is infinitesimally small.
Note: Several readers have argued that Trump Jr.'s tweet solely refers to Syrian refugees. In that case: Since October of 2015, the United States has admitted roughly 8,000 Syrian refugees. Not one has committed an act of terrorism. That's zero deadly Skittles.