Trump Fumbles Basic Math Concept Trying to Brag About Drug Prices

The president’s boasts about his pharmaceutical cuts aren’t just imaginary—they’re also gibberish.

Speaking with reporters in Allentown, Pennsylvania, Sunday evening, Donald Trump suggested that one of the administrative wins that Republican lawmakers should hinge their campaigns on during midterm elections is the “tremendous drop in drug prices.”

“You know we’ve cut drug prices by 1,200, 1,300, 1,400, 1,500 percent,” Trump said. “Because we’re going favored nations, we want the same price as Europe gets, we want the same price as other country gets.”

If Trump’s boast were true, drug companies would actually be paying consumers to take prescription drugs.

“Over the years, 25-30 years ago, it started where they were charging us much more and I put an end to it with a letter that you saw last week,” Trump said.

But the president has not tangibly lowered drug costs. Instead, his office issued letters Thursday to pharmaceutical companies, plainly asking them to lower their prices while vaguely threatening to deploy “every tool in our arsenal” to combat “abusive” prices should they refuse.

Trump has previously posited that the affordable price tags on pharmaceuticals in other countries were due to American federal subsidies that he claimed were financially offsetting their prices. But that’s not reality: The U.S. pays more for drugs because it’s an outlier among high-income, developed countries, which predominantly support universal public health coverage.

Trump’s first-term rule—“Most Favored Nation”—was focused on lowering the cost of Medicare payments on certain drugs, but the plan barely made it out of the White House. The policy was blocked by federal courts shortly after it was announced in late 2020 and was then rescinded by President Joe Biden in 2021.

In May, Trump penned an executive order that set a 30-day deadline for drugmakers to negotiate lower prices. If there was no deal, the U.S. would tie its drug prices to the costs set by other countries. But despite that threat, there hasn’t been any noticeable movement in either direction.

“I don’t know how anybody could win an election if they’re on the other side of that issue,” Trump said Sunday. “So we’ll be dropping drug prices, it will start over the next two to three months.

“But not just 50 percent or 25 percent, which normally would be a lot, because the rest of the world pays much less for the identical drug, and we’re going to be paying the same thing,” Trump said, promising that Americans would pay the same price for drugs as the company’s lowest international cost.

Other things that researchers point to as potentially resolving high drug prices in the U.S. include restricting pharmaceutical monopolies within the country, reworking insurance benefits to restrict out-of-pocket, and recentralizing price negotiations through the leverage of a single-payer system (such as Australia, Germany, the U.K., or any number of other wealthy nations), according to a report by the Commonwealth Fund, a private American foundation focused on health care reform.

As Immigration and Customs Enforcement looks to bolster its ranks by 10,000—courtesy of the slush fund it is provided under Trump’s budget—it’s resorted to poaching local law enforcement officers who participated in ICE’s 287(g) program, which allows local law enforcement to partner with the agency.

In recent days, ICE’s deputy director has reportedly sent out emails urging 287(g) participants to join the agency. “As someone who is currently supporting ICE through the 287(g) program, you understand the unique responsibility we carry in protecting our communities and upholding federal law,” the email says, per NBC News. The offer also carries potential incentives, including a $50,000 signing bonus and up to $60,000 in student loan repayment.

Jonathan Thompson, executive director and CEO of the National Sheriffs’ Association, told NBC the move was “inappropriate behavior of a partner organization,” adding, “We’re all on the same boat. And you just don’t treat friends or partners like this.”

Sheriff Grady Judd of Polk County, Florida, told MSNBC, “We’re a force multiplier to help ICE, and we’ve been spending a lot of time and effort. And the next thing we know, the people who we have submitted to ICE, who have been ICE-trained—on our dime, by the way—received a direct email from the administration.”

Judd reached for an idiom to convey the betrayal: “I mean, that’s biting the hand that’s feeding you.” Other Florida sheriffs also got figurative: “Quite frankly, it’s like letting the fox in the henhouse,” Brevard County’s sheriff told WFTV Channel 9. “We don’t want to burn bridges, but somebody lit the fire on the other end,” observed the sheriff of Bradford County.

A number of sheriffs are now demanding mea culpas from ICE. (Judd, for instance, told NBC that Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem should “get on her big girl pants and do what’s right. She needs to make sure that there’s an apology.”) Some are apparently receiving them: The sheriff’s office in Forsyth County, Georgia, reportedly received an apology from ICE’s Atlanta Field Office.

Just hours before Donald Trump announced he was firing the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, Vice President JD Vance was celebrating some cherry-picked numbers from the latest jobs report. 

In a post on X Friday, Vance shared a graph based on the most recent BLS data from the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, claiming that in the last four months, native-born workers had gained a whopping 1.8  million jobs while foreign-born workers had lost 1.5 million jobs. The number of foreign-born workers included both documented and undocumented workers.

“I was told 6 months ago that Americans losing jobs and the foreign-born gaining jobs was an irreversible demographic fact,” Vance wrote. “Turns out you just needed a new president and a new immigration policy.”

As per usual, Vance was a little behind the curve. 

Within hours, Trump had directed his administration to fire BLS Commissioner Dr. Erika McEntarfer, a Biden-appointee. “Important numbers like this must be fair and accurate, they can’t be manipulated for political purposes,” the president wrote in a post on Truth Social, torching the very numbers Vance had been toasting him over. 

The latest jobs report revised the number of new jobs created by 258,000 in just two months—a revision on par with those that Trump had railed the Biden administration over ahead of the presidential election. It’s honestly amazing that Vance was able to find anything to celebrate in the dismal report, which saw only 73,000 jobs created in July, trailing estimates by more than 30,000.

Trump on Friday proved that fears about the president manipulating official data in his favor are founded, as he fired Erika McEntarfer, the commissioner of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, due to a disappointing July jobs report.

The bureau’s report, released earlier in the day, showed a marked slowdown in job growth. It also revised previous months’ gains downward, shaving nearly 260,000 jobs off May’s and June’s report. Reacting to the news, Trump adviser Steve Bannon suggested appointing “a MAGA Republican that President Trump knows and trusts” to head the BLS.

Shortly thereafter, Trump announced his plan to do just that.

“I was just informed that our Country’s ‘Jobs Numbers’ are being produced by a Biden Appointee,” the president wrote in a Truth Social post on Friday afternoon. He baselessly accused McEntarfer of having fabricated job numbers, both in July and in the lead-up to the 2024 election—when, he claims, McEntarfer attempted to help rig the election for Kamala Harris.

“I have directed my Team to fire this Biden Political Appointee, IMMEDIATELY,” Trump wrote. “She will be replaced with someone much more competent and qualified.” The president dubiously insisted that “the Economy is BOOMING under ‘TRUMP.’”

The move is a remarkable one, as Trump has all but confessed to a plan to ensure that official data (whose integrity has already been imperiled by his cuts to federal statistical agencies) suits MAGA’s narrative.

Steve Benen of MSNBC last month observed that some were worried Trump would cook the books by, for example, telling “the Labor Department to manipulate the data and deceive the public.” However, Benen noted, “there’s been no evidence of statistics being altered to fit a political narrative” to date.

If Trump appoints a MAGA lackey to head the BLS, he wouldn’t have to tell anyone to do anything; the new commissioner would know that the bureau’s numbers are to reflect favorably on the administration no matter what.

The Corporation for Public Broadcasting will be shutting down in response to federal funding cuts, it announced on Friday.

The closure marks a victory in Donald Trump’s war against public media. The CPB’s announcement cites the federal recissions package, which clawed back $1.1 billion in previously approved funding for the organization, and its exclusion from a fiscal spending bill for the first time in over five decades.

“Despite the extraordinary efforts of millions of Americans who called, wrote, and petitioned Congress to preserve federal funding for CPB, we now face the difficult reality of closing our operations,” said CPB president and CEO Patricia Harrison.

The company, which helps support more than 1,500 locally managed public television and radio stations nationwide, including NPR and PBS, will begin an “orderly wind-down” of its operations, including the termination of the majority of its employees by September 30.

Organizations like NPR and PBS have been the targets of Republican ire for years over alleged liberal bias. The national organizations will survive the CPB’s announcement, since they receive most of their funding through nongovernmental sources. But small, local news stations that serve rural areas will be seriously affected by these closures.

Some stations, like KCUW in Pendleton, Oregon; KUHB in St. Paul, Alaska; and WVLS in Monterey, Virginia; rely on CPB for 90 percent of their funding, according to Axios.

“Public media has been one of the most trusted institutions in American life, providing educational opportunity, emergency alerts, civil discourse, and cultural connection to every corner of the country,” Harrison said in the announcement. “We are deeply grateful to our partners across the system for their resilience, leadership, and unwavering dedication to serving the American people.”