President donald trump made a surprising and mathematically impossible claim during a nationally televised press event at the White House.
Trump took questions from reporters Friday night after an announcement about lowering prescription drug prices, during which he made a claim that would essentially mean Americans will be paid many times more to accept prescription drugs, in some cases 100 times more than the cost of the drugs:
And I’ll tell you the story, Glenn, that in my first term I had the honor of being the first president in 28 years to lower drug prices during the course of the year. And we really did it. And I was very proud of myself. We called a press conference. I announced it. It was one-eighth of 1 percent. One eighth of 1 percent. Now drug prices are going to drop 100 percent, 400 percent, 600 percent and a thousand percent in some cases. But for an eighth of a cent, Bobby, think about that. I was very proud because for 28 years no one had done it. And now, I think about it, I said I shouldn’t have had that press conference. But it’s simply true. I was the only one who did it, but it wasn’t much. And now we are going to achieve, in some cases, a reduction of one thousand percent.
This will have a huge impact on everything from Social Security to Medicare and Medicaid. Anything that involves purchasing prescription medications will have an incredible impact. It’s going to go down a lot.
Aside from the fundamental fallacy in Trump’s comments (multiple fact-checking outlets have pointed out that this is not how percentages work), what is surprising is that the president has been making this claim for months, on at least five occasions, without correcting himself. In August it said it had reduced prices by 1,500 percent.