Trump cites numbers a lot. Sometimes they’re mathematically impossible : NPR

LEILA FADEL, HOST:

President Trump uses a lot of numbers. When he rallied Republican members of the House earlier this week, he used the word percentage more than 30 times. And as NPR senior White House correspondent Tamara Keith reports, some of his numbers are mathematically impossible.

TAMARA KEITH, BYLINE: President Trump regularly boasts about the success of airstrikes against accused drug smuggling boats near Venezuela, but his numbers have changed repeatedly. Here it is in chronological order over the past month.

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PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: Ninety-two or 94 percent reduction in drugs arriving by sea.

We reduced it by 96%. Think about it.

Ninety-two percent.

Ninety-six percent.

Ninety-four percent.

Ninety-six point two percent entering the United States – 92.6 by sea.

You know, it’s 97%. I’m trying to figure out who the other 3% are.

KEITH: He always makes the same joke too. The White House declined to cite the source or provide an explanation for the changing numbers. Glenn Kessler ran The Fact Checker project at the Washington Post for 15 years.

GLENN KESSLER: We often make stuff up. I mean, it’s a consistent pattern.

KEITH: During Trump’s first term, Kessler documented more than 30,000 false or misleading statements by the president, and many of them involved numbers.

KESSLER: You always want to have a statistic.

KEITH: Trump also likes to talk about reducing the cost of prescription drugs.

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ASSET: Some prescription drug and pharmaceutical prices will be reduced almost immediately by 50 to 80 to 90 percent.

KEITH: It was May. Since then, complaints have multiplied.

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TRUMP: And we’re not talking about a 25% reduction or a 50% reduction, we’re talking about a 1,500% reduction.

KEITH: 1,500%. But math can be tricky sometimes. So I called a math teacher. Kirk Weiler taught high school math and became famous on the Internet with his more than 400 instructional videos. He said what Trump claims doesn’t make sense when talking about the cost of a product.

KIRK WEILER: If you had a drug that went down 200 percent by a hundred dollars, then the drug would have to cost less than $100, which implies, of course, that the drug companies were paying people to take the drug, which would be great.

KEITH: Great, but that’s not what’s happening. And in remarks earlier this week, Trump suggested he knew there might be a problem with his numbers.

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TRUMP: Depending on how you calculate it, that could be a drop of several thousand percent. It could also be 90% and 80%. You know, there are two ways to calculate. I don’t know if you know that. They said: Donald Trump is exaggerating – no, there are two ways to calculate it.

KEITH: I played this clip for Weiler.

WEILER: Wow (laughter).

KEITH: And he said there’s really only one way to calculate the percentage decrease.

WEILER: Of all the things that are debatable, this just isn’t one of them.

KEITH: Responding to questions, White House spokesman Kush Desai did not explain the president’s calculations, but said, quote, “President Trump correctly identified the fact that Americans pay several times more for exactly the same drugs as their peers in other rich countries.” (ph) Kessler, the fact-checker, says other presidents have been more precise about their language and the numbers they’ve cited because what a president says matters.

Tamara Keith, NPR News.

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