At a White House event last summer, Donald Trump boasted, “We’re going to get the drug prices down — not 30% or 40%, which would be great. Not 50% or 60%. No, we’re going to get them down 1,000%, 600%, 500%, 1,500%.”
The president added that “nobody else” was capable of such a feat, adding that he’d produce “numbers that are not even thought to be achievable.”
Oddly enough, he had a point — but not the one he was trying to make.
Trump continued to wage a losing fight over arithmetic in the months that followed, and this week, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. did his best to defend the president, arguing during a congressional hearing that Trump “has a different way of calculating percentages.” The secretary, who did not appear to be kidding, added, “If you have a $600 drug and you reduce it to $10, that’s a 600% reduction.”
The obvious problem with this is that Kennedy’s math was plainly incorrect, and while the American presidency is powerful, it does not include the authority to concoct “a different way of calculating percentages.” (The headline on The New York Times’ report on the testimony summarized the matter nicely: “RFK Jr. Defends Trump’s Mathematically Impossible Drug Discount Claims.”)
Two days after the hearing, the fight continued at an event in the Oval Office. The Associated Press reported:
President Donald Trump, who helped push the term ‘fake news’ into the mainstream, now seems to have a new favorite subject: fake math.
During a Thursday event announcing a deal with drugmaker Regeneron to lower the cost of its pharmaceutical products, Trump defended his past claims that prices on prescription medications had been cut by well over 100% — something that is mathematically impossible without manufacturers dropping prices to zero and then presumably paying consumers to use their product.
Partway through the event at the White House, Kennedy argued, “If you go from $600 to $100, that is a 600% savings.” In reality, it’s an 83% savings — 600 minus 100 is 500, and 500 divided by 600 is 83% — as the Harvard-educated health secretary really ought to understand.
The president nevertheless ran with this, acknowledging that he’d taken “a lot of heat” for his frequent false claims about math, but nevertheless insisting that there are “two ways of calculating” percentages.
Trump concluded that it ultimately “doesn’t make any difference” whether people prefer the correct math of his alternative version.
For many years, conservatives were preoccupied with the idea of moral relativism, which, to crudely summarize, is a philosophical worldview that rejects the idea of universal moral truths. Rather, moral relativists believe that questions about right and wrong are inherently subjective and can vary based on cultures and individual experiences.
In the Trump era, the right has largely moved on from concerns about moral relativism, which has apparently given way to mathematical relativism: a new worldview that rejects the idea of arithmetical truths.
To hear the president and the health secretary tell it, people with access to calculators can have their way of crunching numbers, but this White House prefers a different approach — and as far as Trump is concerned, both are equally legitimate. Indeed, the president made it sound at Thursday’s event as if it’s insulting to argue that his alternative math is somehow inferior to real math.
Complicating matters, there’s a larger context to Trump’s ignorance. For example, he often uses the word “trillion” in ways that suggest he doesn’t understand what it means.
Trump also tried to justify his deadly military strikes on civilian boats in international waters by saying that 300 million people died from drugs in the United States in 2024 — a total that was off by almost 300 million.
This is the same president who’s so confident in his mathematical expertise that he came up with international trade tariff rates based on formulas that only exist in his head. That was obviously unwise, but it was especially problematic given his unfamiliarity with how numbers work.
I’m often reminded of something Bill Lueders wrote for The Bulwark last year: “Whatever the claim, the president has the numbers to prove it, even if he has to make them up.”
It remains an important detail. The incumbent president doesn’t use numbers and statistics like an adult; he uses numbers and statistics that he thinks sound good and make him feel better.
This post updates our related earlier coverage.
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