President Donald Trump proudly touted a new deal Friday his administration had reached with a British drugmaker to lower drug costs, and as high as “1,000%” in some cases, a claim that journalist Jason Easley ripped into Saturday as just the latest example of Trump’s “apparent growing inability to form thoughts.”
“Now, drug prices are gonna be going down a 100%, 400%, 600%, 1,000% in some cases, but for one eighth of a cent,” Trump said Friday during the announcement at the White House. “I was so proud because for 28 years nobody had done it.”
Writing on his left-leaning news website PoliticusUSA, Easley tore into Trump’s claims as being incompatible with “basic math.”
“It is impossible to lower the price of any good by more than 100%. It is basic math,” Easley wrote.
“Trump’s claim of reducing prices by 1,000% means that Americans will be getting paid by the drug companies ten times the value of the drug to take the medication. When put in those terms, the lunacy is apparent, but things were only starting to go off the rails.”
Trump has touted the 1,000% figure in the past, such as last month where he asserted that drug prices in some cases would be reduced “by 1,000%” within a year’s time, a statement that was backed up by a White House spokesperson. Economists promptly shredded Trump for his “fuzzy math” and big promises.
For Easley, Trump’s repeated use of the 1,000% figure was more than just a big promise, but rather, a sign of his growing tendency to sound “incoherent.”
“The video can be easily glossed over, especially when someone has told as many lies and babbled as many words as Donald Trump has over the past decade, but transcripts of the words that the man actually puts together are more revealing,” Easley wrote.
Easley is not alone in noting what critics say are signs of Trump’s mental decline; on Friday, Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker alleged that the president has dementia, and urged his family to help him get mental health support.
“I genuinely think there is something wrong with him,” Pritzker said. “I wish that his family would intervene, because I do think he needs mental health help, and I don’t think anybody around him that works for him is going to do that, because they’re benefiting from his failure of mental health, his dementia. I wish somebody would help out the president of the United States."