President Donald Trump is not a historian. In fact, as the Washington Post's Jenna Johnson documented so well on Wednesday, he often seems to be learning basic historical facts before our very eyes while boldly claiming nobody previously knew those basic facts. Other times he makes huge historical claims without any real basis.
But even by Trump's standards, he let loose a doozie on Thursday.
Appearing at an event in Florida, Trump declared that "human trafficking is worse than it's ever been in the history of the world." Trump has said before that human trafficking "may be" worse than ever before; now, it seems, he's become convinced of it.
But how?
It seems logical to assume that numbers were significantly higher when official slavery existed, and logic doesn't fail us here.
An estimate of Roman slavery by Stanford University's Walter Scheidel in 2007 hypothesized that slaves accounted for "between 7 and 13 percent of the imperial population," with between 5 and 8.5 million people enslaved at any given point in Italy, Egypt and elsewhere. That would be at least 12 times more pervasive than today.
And slavery thrived for centuries. As recently as 1762, Adam Smith in a famous quote noted that slavery was still pervasive across the world. "We are apt to imagine that slavery is entirely abolished at this time, without considering that this is the case in only a small part of Europe; not remembering that all over Moscovy and all the eastern parts of Europe, and the whole of Asia, that is, from Bohemia to the Indian Ocean, all over Africa, and the greatest part of America, it is still in use."
And shortly before slavery was abolished in the United States, the 1860 Census found 3.9 million slaves in a U.S. population of 31 million people--meaning 1 out of 8 people were slaves, or 12.5 percent.
It seems this is one of those facts that nobody else knew--because it's not true.
Editorial on 04/22/2018