Donald Trump just broke math on live TV—promising a 1,000% price cut that turns $10 pills into $20, leaving even a Fox News host visibly baffled.
In a recent appearance on The Story with Martha MacCallum, the 79-year-old president made a sweeping promise about drug prices that defied the laws of mathematics—and then immediately contradicted himself.
“We’re gonna be reducing drug costs over the next year, year and a half… by a thousand percent,” Trump said confidently.
Then, without missing a beat, he added: “It’ll go from $10 to $20 for us.”
Let that sink in. A “1,000 percent” reduction on a $10 drug would not take the price to $5 or $1—it would take it to negative $90. That’s not a price cut; that’s pharmaceutical companies paying you to take their meds. Meanwhile, going from $10 to $20 is literally a 100 percent increase, the polar opposite of what he just promised.
The contradiction was so blatant it didn’t need a fact-checker—just a calculator. Or, frankly, a functioning brain.
MacCallum looked visibly puzzled but didn’t challenge the claim, letting the whopper hang in the air like a math-class fart.
As bonkers as it sounds, this isn’t even Trump’s first numerical faceplant on drug prices. Back in July, he served up an equally head-spinning word salad: “1,000… 1,100, 1,200, 1,300, 1,400… 700, 600 percent.” What those numbers were supposed to mean is anyone’s guess.
Just to be clear: You cannot reduce anything by more than 100 percent. That’s the ceiling. Once you hit zero, you’re done. Anything more is pure fiction—or economic fanfiction, in Trump’s case.
Even his anecdotes don’t help. He claimed a friend bought Ozempic for $88 in London but paid much more in New York. OK, fair enough—prices abroad often are lower. But then he turned around and said the price would go from $10 to $20 for Americans, while touting a “1,000 percent” drop. These two statements cannot both be true in the same reality.
Still, Trump isn’t backing off the fantasy math. He’s doubled (or is it tripled?) down, waving around threats to Mercedes, BMW, and Volkswagen to pressure European countries into compliance with his drug pricing plans—because, apparently, German carmakers control the global pharmaceutical market now?
He’s also floated the idea of “1,200 to 1,500 percent” reductions. Again: impossible. It’s like promising to lose 150 pounds from a 100-pound body.
Reality vs. Trump’s Brain
The White House has tried to make Trump’s vague claims sound policy-adjacent, pointing to a “most-favored nation” strategy that aims to peg U.S. drug prices to the lowest rates abroad. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick has even hinted at sweeping changes and tough negotiations with pharma CEOs.
That’s all fair game—typical political posturing with a dose of pressure tactics. But nothing, absolutely nothing, makes a “minus 1,000 percent” discount real.
Trump’s drug-price delusion fits neatly into a broader pattern that’s increasingly hard to ignore: the mental lapses, the confusion, the outright fabrications that sound less like political spin and more like cognitive decline.
In August, Trump forgot the name of the Pacific Ocean—the Pacific Ocean—and fumbled geography days later by claiming he’d just returned from the Middle East, even though he hadn’t been there in months.
He’s swapped countries mid-sentence when bragging about “solving” foreign conflicts and has misidentified wars he supposedly prevented. At a public event, he couldn’t spot someone standing directly in front of him—even after being told, “right here.”
At Windsor Castle this week, Trump delivered a rambling, error-ridden speech that left even his loyalists shaking their heads.
Then there’s the moment that doesn’t even fit into any known framework: he mentioned a governor who doesn’t exist. Just invented one. Out of thin air.
Watch the clip below from Fox News:
Trump: "We're gonna reducing drug costs over the next year and a half by 1,000 percent." pic.twitter.com/jX5eg3QEQY
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) September 18, 2025
