President Donald Trump has made mathematically impossible claims about reducing drug prices by up to 1,500%, prompting widespread criticism from experts and social media users who pointed out that such reductions would mean pharmaceutical companies would pay customers to take medications.
Speaking to reporters on Sunday, August 3, 2025, before boarding Air Force One at Lehigh Valley International Airport, Trump declared that his administration had “cut drug prices by 1,200, 1,300, 1,400, 1,500%.” The President emphasized his claim by adding that he did not mean modest reductions, stating he meant cuts of “14 — 1,500%.”
The assertion defies basic mathematics, as experts and critics quickly noted. A 100% price reduction would make medications free, while anything beyond that percentage would theoretically require pharmaceutical companies to pay patients to receive their drugs. Under Trump’s claimed 1,500% reduction, a prescription normally costing $100 would result in the patient receiving the medication at no cost plus $1,400 in cash from the pharmacy.
Geoffrey Joyce, director of health policy at the University of Southern California’s Schaeffer Center, dismissed Trump’s claim as “total fiction” and confirmed it would amount to drug companies paying customers rather than charging them. Mariana Socal, an associate professor of health policy and management at Johns Hopkins University who studies the pharmaceutical market, indicated that Trump’s math was difficult to follow and that she found it challenging to translate those numbers into actual estimates patients would see at pharmacy counters.
This was not the first time Trump made such claims. On July 23, 2025, at a reception for Republican members of Congress, he promised to reduce drug prices by “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 White House press aides did not respond to queries about what Trump might have meant by these statements.
During the same Sunday remarks, Trump appeared to acknowledge that drug price reductions had not yet occurred, stating that the administration would be dropping drug prices over the next two to three months by similar percentages. This contradicted his earlier assertion that such cuts had already been implemented.
Charles Leerhsen, co-author of Trump’s 1990 book “Surviving at the Top,” suggested that Trump’s apparent inability to understand percentages helps explain his business failures, including overpaying for the Plaza Hotel in New York City and bankrupting casinos in Atlantic City. Leerhsen described Trump as intellectually and emotionally limited, noting that some people mistake his confusion for strategic thinking.
In reality, Trump has reversed his predecessor Joe Biden’s efforts to reduce prescription prices. On his first day in office, Trump rescinded multiple Biden executive orders that had reduced drug prices for enrollees of Medicare and Medicaid programs.
The Trump administration has taken some steps regarding pharmaceutical pricing. Last week, Trump posted letters on social media that he claimed to have sent to Eli Lilly and Company and 16 other major pharmaceutical companies, demanding they charge American customers the same low prices offered elsewhere in the world. In these letters, Trump threatened to deploy “every tool in our arsenal to protect American families from continued abusive drug pricing practices” if companies refused to comply.
When asked for evidence supporting Trump’s pricing claims, White House spokesman Kush Desai provided only a chart showing price differentials for drugs between the United States and comparable countries. He stated it was an objective fact that Americans pay exponentially more for identical drugs compared to people in other developed countries, but offered no specific data to support the 1,500% reduction claim.
Trump also complained that industry proposals to lower prices, as demanded in his May 12 executive order, had only promised more of the same, including requests for policy changes that would result in billions of dollars in handouts to the industry.
Social media users and political commentators quickly mocked Trump’s mathematical impossibility. Critics noted concerns about having a numerically illiterate person in charge of tariff policy and questioned whether someone who apparently failed to understand basic percentages should be making economic decisions. Some suggested that Wharton should reclaim Trump’s undergraduate degree.
The incident occurred during the same period when Trump expressed distrust of Bureau of Labor Statistics economic data, adding to questions about his understanding of numerical information and statistical analysis.