Trump’s prescription drug price math isn’t just wrong — it’s impossible

“There’s two ways of calculating a percentage,” Health and Human Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said Wednesday to Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., at a U.S. Senate Finance Committee hearing. Warren had rightly dismissed President Donald Trump’s claim that he had lowered drug prices by up to 600%, and she demanded some “real math.” But Kennedy, out of either ignorance or shameless sycophancy to Trump, shot back with some MAGA math. “If you have a $600 drug, and you reduce it to $10,” Kennedy said, “that’s a 600% reduction.”

This Video Is Trending Right Now →

No, it’s not. This point can’t be stressed enough in case there’s a middle schooler reading the opinion page: No! It’s just not.

If the price of a drug were reduced from $600 to $10, that would be a 98.3% decrease. A 600% reduction, Warren said, “means companies should be paying you to take their drugs.”  While such a reduction would be a significant and beneficial policy change, Warren repeated a point that Democrats have been making for months: Several of the name-brand drugs at the TrumpRx website, even at lower prices, still cost considerably more than their generic equivalents.

Kennedy didn’t come up with the 600% nonsense himself. Trump has consistently claimed that he’s reduced the price of drugs by many times more than the price of those drugs. Kennedy’s maddening repetition of pseudo-math may be the most glaring sign of a broader problem: that the president has completely surrounded himself with yes-men during this term. Apparently, nobody has dared to tell him he’s wrong. Instead, they’re standing around marveling at the emperor’s new math.

When an administration is known equally for its lies and its incompetence, it can be difficult, if not impossible, to know which is at play at any time.  Trump tells — and demands that his officials tell — obvious lies: about his poll numbers, about inflation, about Black migrants eating cats and dogs, about noncitizens voting. Just Thursday, he lied that more people attended his inauguration than the 1963 March on Washington.

But Trump also appears not to know things he should know — such as which Americans could have prevented the Civil War, why the president of Liberia can speak English “so beautifully” and why you don’t stare at a solar eclipse. Thus, it’s unclear if his insistence that he’s reduced drug prices by up to 600% is an authoritarian demand that people accept what he knows (and they know) to be a lie — or if the president and his appointees, who almost to a person are out of their depth, really are that mathematically inept.

The Trump White House isn’t the first group of policymakers pushing bogus math. In 1897, the Indiana House passed — unanimously! — “an act introducing a new mathematical truth,” namely that pi, a circle’s circumference divided by its diameter, equals 3.2. The roughest approximation of pi, an irrational number, is of course 3.14. A mocking editorial from The Chicago Tribune said, “An Illinois circle or a circle originating in Ohio will find its proportions modified as soon as it lands on Indiana soil,” and wondered if Indiana wouldn’t eventually take another look at pi, “lop off another decimal and call it 3.” (The bill died in the state Senate.)

What the Trump administration is saying feels worse. Because in discussing the price of prescription drugs, we’re not dealing with geometry, just basic arithmetic. And this administration is flunking.