New York Times:

The federal budget deficit swelled to $779 billion in fiscal year 2018, the Treasury Department said on Monday, driven in large part by a sharp decline in corporate tax revenues after the Trump tax cuts took effect.

The deficit rose nearly 17 percent year over year, from $666 billion in 2017. It is now on pace to top $1 trillion a year before the next presidential election, according to forecasts from the Trump administration and outside analysts. The deficit for the 2018 fiscal year, which ended Sept. 30, was the largest since 2012, when the economy and federal revenues were still recovering from the depths of the recession.

Administration officials attributed the deficit’s rise to greater federal spending, including the military and domestic budget increases that President Trump approved this year, not the $1.5 trillion tax cut.

I know: nobody cares when it’s Trump doing it. Still, it’s infuriating to the small handful of us who still care about such things.

Oh, by the way:

Candidate Donald Trump, April 2, 2016:

DT: We’ve got to get rid of the $19 trillion in debt.

BW: How long would that take?

DT: I think I could do it fairly quickly, because of the fact the numbers . . . .

BW: What’s fairly quickly?

DT: Well, I would say over a period of eight years.

It’s now $21.6 trillion, and ballooning like mad under Trump.

[Cross-posted at The Jury Talks Back.]

That’s what The Daily Beast tells us in this headline (well, they put it a different way):

I’d say it’s really more like this:

Or, more accurately: "Yes, the results suggest a single Native American ancestor eight generations ago." https://t.co/XsLjFGUh20 https://t.co/6BkXQj1mdW

— Patterico (@Patterico) October 15, 2018

The original story broke in the Boston Globe, with a more cautious headline: Warren releases results of DNA test.

Senator Elizabeth Warren has released a DNA test that provides “strong evidence’’ she had a Native American in her family tree dating back 6 to 10 generations, an unprecedented move by one of the top possible contenders for the 2020 Democratic nomination for president.

Warren, whose claims to Native American blood have been mocked by President Trump and other Republicans, provided the test results to the Globe on Sunday in an effort to defuse questions about her ancestry that have persisted for years. She planned an elaborate rollout Monday of the results as she aimed for widespread attention.

The analysis of Warren’s DNA was done by Carlos D. Bustamante, a Stanford University professor and expert in the field who won a 2010 MacArthur fellowship, also known as a genius grant, for his work on tracking population migration via DNA analysis.

You can read the actual DNA report itself here. The relevant statement is this:

The total and average segment size suggest (via the method of moments) an unadmixed Native American ancestor in the pedigree at approximately 8 generations before the sample.

The word “suggest” elsewhere in the report is strengthened to “strongly support” in the conclusion, although no additional data is added to explain why the conclusion is stronger. Also, in the conclusion, the likely generation is widened into a range of generations (6-10) which conveniently comes closer to fitting Warren’s narrative of a great-great-great grandmother who was Native American.

The important upshot: Trump was right to call her Pocahontas instead of Fauxcahontas!

He’s always right, you know.

UPDATE: The Boston Globe has issued a correction:

Due to a math error, a story about Elizabeth Warren misstated the ancestry percentage of a potential 10th generation relative. It should be 1/1,024.

As commenter harkin points out, that’s a fraction, not a percentage, but keep trying, guys.

When you convert to a percentage, you get Warren having .0976% Native American blood. Here’s the thing, though: that is totally unremarkable and indeed about half the average for an American of European ancestry.

On average, the scientists found, people who identified as African-American had genes that were only 73.2 percent African. European genes accounted for 24 percent of their DNA, while .8 percent came from Native Americans.

Latinos, on the other hand, had genes that were on average 65.1 percent European, 18 percent Native American, and 6.2 percent African. The researchers found that European-Americans had genomes that were on average 98.6 percent European, .19 percent African, and .18 Native American.

Could Donald Trump be more of a native American than Warren? Based on these numbers, that seems likely.

Calling this any sort of vindication for Warren is utterly laughable.

UPDATE x2: If my math is correct, the percentage for the eighth generation (the most likely according to the report) would be .39% — about double the average for the average American of European descent, and still a minuscule amount.

[Cross-posted at The Jury Talks Back.]