Although numbers vary day to day and poll to poll, about 97% of Americans support deporting immigrants who commit violent crimes. About 52% support deporting immigrants who have committed nonviolent crimes. Only 32% support deporting all immigrants who entered illegally, and a vanishingly small number support expelling legal immigrants.

News and political commentators often cite these kind of numbers to point out that people simultaneously support the deportation of criminals but not the harassment of legal immigrants. But this sheds little light on the huge disconnect in public opinion over the wholesale rounding up immigrants by the Trump Administration.

I submit that the missing puzzle piece of our understanding is the role of exaggeration. In fact I cannot exaggerate the awful power of exaggeration enough.

The fact is that undocumented immigrants are about half as likely to commit violent crimes than native-born citizens. They are 4 times less likely to commit nonviolent crimes and 2.5 times less likely to commit drug-related offenses. These numbers hold firm across all geographical boundaries.

But when Trump talks about immigrants, he hyper-exaggerates the level of crime in that population far beyond what the data supports. To hear him talk, one would think that immigrants are running amok and causing mass havoc.

This incredible level of exaggeration, well beyond anything the actual facts support, creates the essential disconnect in our brains that allows people to both conclude that while they support legal immigrants but want to see “all those criminal illegals” deported.

Look at it this way. Just to take a number for illustration purposes, let’s say 5% of illegal immigrants are criminals. Trump makes it sound like 90% are criminals. Even if we are skeptical and fair-minded and allow for some exaggeration, we conclude that let’s say 25% are criminals that should be deported.

So when the actual number is 5% and Trump skews our perception to “feel like” it’s something on the order of 25%, what happens? We naturally expect and demand to see 25% arrested and deported. But there are not 25%, so to show it is meeting expectations the government rounds up and deports a whole lot of innocent immigrants in order to demonstrate it is doing it’s job to keep us safe. It must round up a whole lot of good, honest immigrants to satisfy the false perception it has created. We expect no less.

Using gross exaggeration to create unwarranted expectations is used, particularly by Trump, in a lot of other areas as well. Take Social Security as just one other example. The actual administrative overhead of managing our Social Security program is about 0.6%. This is a fantastically low amount of overhead that private companies and even non-profit organizations cannot come anywhere close to matching.

Yet to listen to Trump, you would think, even allowing for his characteristic hyperbole, that the Social Security system is at least somewhat bloated with waste and inefficiency. So say a 5% cut to eliminate waste, fraud, and abuse might seem like a reasonable, measured, and warranted cost control measure. But if one made such cuts it could in reality only come from reducing legitimate benefits.

That is the power of exaggeration and it is perhaps one of the most destructive weapons that Trump wields wantonly with complete abandon. It dramatically affects how we perceive immigration, Medicare, Medicaid, tariffs, and most everything else that Trump chooses to rail about.

We need to call out Trump more strongly and more often for exaggeration, as well as others who grossly exaggerate, and not simply accept it as a personality characteristic or a legitimate rhetorical style.

Recognizing the destructive power of exaggeration is a first necessary step toward arriving at more sane and fact-based public policy.

And THAT is no exaggeration.