According to Donald Trump’s math, Big Pharma will soon be paying you to take their meds
Donald Trump is back on his favorite hobby of making outrageous claims. This week, he announced he’s slashing prescription drug prices by “400, 500, and even 600 percent.” That basically means pharmacies will hand you pills for free and Venmo you $20 for your trouble.
In a prime-time White House address on Wednesday, December 17, Trump gaslit both mathematics and Americans. He claimed that drug prices will be reduced by up to 600% by January, under his “Most Favored Nation” policy. The claim is impressive. Because a 100% cut takes the price to zero, and anything past that? Congratulations, Big Pharma is now running a charity.
According to Trump, he negotiated with drug companies and foreign countries, threatened tariffs, and achieved “numbers never conceived possible.” True that, president, those really are impossible. Even Fox News had to pause at that and do basic arithmetic on-air. But Trump claims he has made that possible, and the price cuts will go live on a new portal, TrumpRX.gov.
I’m doing what no politician of either party has ever done—standing up to to the special interest to dramatically reduce the price of prescription drugs.
Trump’s claim was so outrageous, even Fox News had to question it
His speech wasn’t anything we didn’t expect. It was a classic Trump composition. Insurance companies are villains, the Democrats are “controlled,” and he alone is the heroic negotiator. In his own words, “there has never been anything like this in the history of our country.” Yes, no one in the history of America has gotten mathematics this wrong.
Yet, Trump wants Americans to believe that the laws of economics have been suspended by executive swagger. So, on Fox, journalist John Roberts pointed out the obvious problem: you can’t cut something by 400–600% without going negative. And that would mean drug companies literally pay consumers to take their products.
So, Roberts plainly asked Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick how much of Trump’s speech was hyperbole. But Lutnick couldn’t admit that Trump was being ridiculous. Instead, he tried to rescue the claim by rephrasing it as a trick, “depending on how you look at it.” Now brace yourself for his argument:
What he [Trump] is saying is if a drug was a $100 and you bring the drug down to $13. If you’re looking at it from $13, it’s down 7 times. It was 700% higher in price before. It’s down 700% now.
Commerce Secretary Lutnick tried to save Trump from embarrassment with another embarrassing argument
In short, Lutnick argued that if a $100 drug is slashed down to $13, that $13 would need to rise “700%” to return to $100. “You could say it’s down 87%. Or, you could say it would have to go up 700% to be the same one,” he said. In other words, he blamed everyone’s perspective because nobody knows more about mathematics than Trump, of course.
But Trump’s assertions are beyond saving. What Lutnick described is not a “different way of looking at it.” That’s changing the sentence after it lands badly. If Trump wanted to claim an 80–90% reduction, he could have said that. Yet, he chose a number that sounds like a demolition derby. Because a 600% cut sounds like Trump suplexing Big Pharma off the top rope, and shows his domination.
Anyone with elementary education knows that a percent decrease is bounded at 100%. You can’t reduce a positive price by more than the entire price and still pretend you’re talking about a price. Economists have been pointing this out for months now. Back in August, Trump bragged about “1500%” reductions (via Forbes), which is the same impossibility with extra glitter on it.
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