WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump, who has repeatedly bragged about how smart he is, apparently has trouble with basic arithmetic, having asserted a mystifying lie about drug prices several times now.
“You know, we’ve cut drug prices by 1200, 1300, 1400, 1500%. I don’t mean 50%, I mean 1400, 1500%,” he told reporters Sunday before boarding Air Force One to return to the White House following another weekend of golf at his New Jersey course.
He had made the same false claim 12 days earlier at a reception for Republican members of Congress: “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 1000%, 600%, 500%, 1500%.”
The declaration, of course, is absurd on its face.
A product becomes free if the sale price is lowered by 100%. To reduce the cost of a prescription drug beyond that implies that the customer would actually receive a rebate to take the medication off the pharmacy’s hands.
Trump’s “1500%” claim would mean that a patient would receive a prescription that normally costs $100 for nothing, along with $1,400 in cash.
White House press aides did not respond to HuffPost’s queries about what Trump might have meant.
“He’s beyond unusual. And that I’ve never met a person so intellectually and emotionally — because there is no compensation — limited,” said Charles Leerhsen, the co-author of Trump’s 1990 book “Surviving at the Top,” who has been warning about Trump’s innumeracy and, more generally, his ignorance, since Trump began his first run for president in 2015.
“And that’s why some people mistake his idiocy for ‘chess on three levels,’” Leerhsen continued, “because, being unable to understand him, and feeling that nobody could be as dumb as he seems, they arrive at the conclusion that he is actually smarter than they are.”
AP Photo/Julia Demaree Nikhinson
Over the years, Trump has repeatedly boasted about how intelligent he is, offering as proof the fact that his uncle taught at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “Actually, throughout my life, my two greatest assets have been mental stability and being, like, really smart,” Trump wrote in a 2018 social media post.
Leerhsen said Trump’s apparent inability to understand how percentages work helps explain his business failures, such as massively overpaying for the Plaza Hotel in New York City and bankrupting casinos in Atlantic City.
“That’s exactly why those things happened. He’s not one of those people who compensates for being bad at one thing — say, words — by being good at another — say, numbers,” he said.
In reality, Trump has actually undone his predecessor Joe Biden’s efforts to reduce prescription prices. On his first day in office, Trump rescinded a long list of Biden’s executive orders, including those reducing drug prices for enrollees of Medicare and Medicaid.
Last week, Trump posted a letter on social media that he said he had sent to Eli Lilly and Company demanding that it charge its American customers the low prices it charges elsewhere in the world. He then posted letters to 16 other major pharmaceutical companies.
“If you refuse to step up, we will deploy every tool in our arsenal to protect American families from continued abusive drug pricing practices,” Trump wrote.
He also complained that industry proposals to lower prices, as he had demanded in a May 12 executive order, had only “promised more of the same: shifting blame and requesting policy changes that would result in billions of dollars in handouts to industry.”