How big is Donald Trump Jr’s bowl of Skittles?
Donald Trump Junior, who has previously made headlines for posing for trophy shots beside a variety of slain African animals, has again drawn public ire for a tweet in which he compared Syrian refugees to deadly Skittles.
The tweet, which was sent from what has the appearance of an official Trump/Pence account, claims to be an analogy of “our Syrian refugee problem” that “says it all”.
“If I had a bowl of Skittles and I told you just three would kill you. Would you take a handful?” it reads.
The post has unsurprisingly sparked a massive social media backlash.
But it is also worth checking if the analogy holds water.
Given that the post does not specify the size of the bowl of Skittles, it is impossible to say definitively that it is factually incorrect.
Instead, we can work out how large the bowl would need to be, in order to make the Skittles it contains representative of the risk posed to Americans by Syrian refugees.
Conservative think tank the Cato Institute has already done most of the hard work by calculating the statistical risk of an American being murdered in a terrorist attack by a refugee.
Their calculations are based on the number of Americans killed by refugees between 1975 and the end of 2015, and put the risk at one in 3.64 billion per year.
Leaving aside that this does not specify the nationality of the attacker, this puts the number of Skittles that would need to be in Mr Trump Junior’s aforementioned bowl at 10.92 billion, in order for three of those Skittles to be deadly.
A Skittle weighs on average about 1.062 grams.
So for Trump Junior’s analogy to be factually accurate, he would need to be talking about a bowl capable of holding 11,597 tonnes of Skittles — the equivalent of 1,932 African elephants.
