The Chart of the Year?

“Behind every line on a graph, there lies an extraordinary human story.”

That’s the tagline to Hannah Fry’s “Uncharted” podcast, which tells the stories behind ten charts that have had a profound impact on the world in which we live. It’s an engaging series, though with one very high bar to clear. Graphs and charts are inherently visual in how they communicate information, while the stories are told only in an audio format. Some of the stories represent scientific triumphs, others are controversial, but all the stories have left their mark. As you listen to the episodes, you’ll almost certainly wish you could see the graphs they describe.

The world finds the world in an unusual situation, in which a chart has had a profound impact on the world in which we live. It played a central role in a major news event, the outcome of which cannot be understated because its aftermath still unfolding. If that chart didn’t exist, one can legitimately argue the world would now be a very different place.

We’re referring to the failed attempt on former President Donald Trump’s life on Saturday, 13 July 2024 while campaigning for the 2024 U.S. presidential election in Butler, Pennsylvania. Here’s the story confirming the role the chart had in shaping the outcome of the attempted presidential assassination:

Donald J. Trump marveled to his former White House doctor about his good fortune hours after he was injured during a shooting on Saturday.

“That chart that I was going over saved my life,” Mr. Trump, the Republicans’ presumptive presidential nominee, told the doctor, Representative Ronny Jackson of Texas, by phone a few hours after an assassination attempt.

Mr. Trump was referring to a chart featuring immigration statistics on a screen to his right at his rally in a field in Butler County, Pa. He had turned to point to it and describe what was on the screen when shots rang out.

“He goes, ‘The border patrol saved my life,’” Dr. Jackson recounted in an interview on Sunday. “‘I was going over that border patrol chart.’ He said, ‘If I hadn’t pointed at that chart and turned my head to look at it, that bullet would have hit me right in the head.’”

As it was, the bullet struck the upper part of the former President’s right ear. Had Trump not turned his head to look at the chart, his injuries would likely have been fatal.

At this point, you now have the experience of what its like to listen one of Hannah Fry’s Uncharted podcasts telling how a chart changed the world. You want to see it. We won’t keep you in suspense, here it is:

After reviewing the chart, we think we understand how it saved Trump’s life. It’s not very well done.

The graph is based on data from U.S. Customs and Border Protection, which has been presented using a stacked bar chart format using different colors to indicate the number of different types of border encounters recorded by the U.S. Border Patrol. It shows the count of the single adults (yellow-orange), people in families (blue) and unaccompanied minors (red) who the U.S. border patrol encountered after they crossed the country’s southwest border with Mexico.

We know that because many annotations were added to that chart by U.S. Senator Ron Johnson (R-WI), who provided the chart to the Trump campaign. Here’s an excerpt of that story:

U.S. Sen. Ron Johnson may have played a serendipitous role in former President Donald Trump surviving the Saturday assassination attempt in Pennsylvania.

That’s because Trump, as he detailed in an interview with The New York Post, turned his head slightly the moment before shots were fired to read a chart on illegal immigration. The source of that chart? Johnson, the senator said on Fox News’s Special Report with Bret Baier.

In an interview with Baier, the senator said he initially showed a chart on illegal immigration to Trump on a plane ride to a rally in Green Bay. The senator said that Trump liked the chart, and his team took it, tweaked it and used it at the Saturday rally.

Before we go any further, here’s what that public domain chart looked like before Trump’s team “tweaked” it:

This version of the chart has a lot less annotated baggage on it. In comparing the two charts, the annotations added by Trump’s campaign team really clutter it up. Worse, one of those added features is a glaring mistake.

We’re specifically referring to the vertical red arrow at the bottom of the chart pointing the lowest point in border encounters during his term in office from January 2017 through January 2021. That low point took place as the U.S. economy bottomed in April 2020 as a direct result of the lockdowns that drove the Coronavirus Pandemic recession.

When you read the text beside that vertical red arrow however, it incorrectly identifies that point in time as when “Trump Leaves Office”. Which of course, didn’t happen until January 2021. The red arrow is positioned seven months in time ahead of where it should be pointing.

There’s more we can critique, but given the obvious mistake of the arrow’s position and the annotated clutter his campaign team added to Johnson’s chart, we think it’s no wonder the former President had to turn to look at it. It’s so overloaded with annotations that the underlying story of the data it presents becomes lost and unmemorable. Since it was so cluttered and unmemorable, the former president had to turn to look at it while speaking at his campaign rally so he could make whatever point he was trying to make about it.

If it had been better done, we think the former president might not have survived the attempted assassination. If you think about it, that’s an extraordinary human story that we’re only able to tell because of the information presented on a chart. It’s just one that someday might be told by Matt Parker instead of Hannah Fry.

Image Credit: Microsoft Copilot Designer.. Prompt: “A simple bar chart on graph paper”.