To hear the president tell it, people with calculators can have their way of crunching numbers, but this White House prefers a different approach.
In the Trump era, the right has largely moved on from concerns about moral relativism, which has apparently given way to *mathematical* relativism:
It’s a worldview, embraced by the White House, that rejects the idea of arithmetical truths.
www.ms.now/rachel-maddo...
— Steve Benen (@stevebenen.com) 2026-04-24T13:39:49.827Z
https://www.ms.now/rachel-maddow-show/maddowblog/trump-rfk-jr-losing-fight-math-hearing
Trump continued to wage a losing fight over arithmetic in the months that followed, and this week, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. did his best to defend the president, arguing during a congressional hearing that Trump “
has a different way of calculating percentages.” The secretary, who did not appear to be kidding, added, “
If you have a $600 drug and you reduce it to $10, that’s a 600% reduction.”....
Two days after the hearing, the fight continued at an event in the Oval Office. The Associated Press reported:
President Donald Trump, who helped push the term ‘fake news’ into the mainstream, now seems to have a new favorite subject: fake math.
During a Thursday event announcing a deal with drugmaker Regeneron to lower the cost of its pharmaceutical products, Trump defended his past claims that prices on prescription medications had been cut by well over 100% — something that is mathematically impossible without manufacturers dropping prices to zero and then presumably paying consumers to use their product.
....The president nevertheless ran with this, acknowledging that he’d taken “a lot of heat” for his frequent false claims about math, but nevertheless insisting that there are
“two ways of calculating” percentages.
Trump: "I took a lot of heat -- I'd say, 500, 600%. But we also say sometimes 50%, 60%. Different kinds of calculation. There are two ways of calculating it."
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com) 2026-04-23T19:30:13.268Z
....This is the same president who’s so confident in his mathematical expertise tha
t he came up with international trade tariff rates based on formulas that only exist in his head. That was obviously unwise, but it was especially problematic given his unfamiliarity with how numbers work.
I’m often reminded of something Bill Lueders wrote for The Bulwark last year:
“Whatever the claim, the president has the numbers to prove it, even if he has to make them up.”
It remains an important detail.
The incumbent president doesn’t use numbers and statistics like an adult; he uses numbers and statistics that he thinks sound good and make him feel better.
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