Breaking bad
By 
What can men do against such reckless lies?
The claim that Trump administration policy regarding fentanyl saved the lives of more than one third of the nation’s population in the first three months of 2025 has multiple functions.
First, some extremely stupid credulous people who are incapable of the most rudimentary statistical reasoning will accept on its face.
Second, it will own the libs who take it literally not seriously, or whatever other bullshit formulation is employed by the fascist propaganda machine to rationalize its most egregious lies.
Third, claims like this undermine the very concept of some sort of reliable public discourse, especially one emanating from purportedly authoritative government sources. In Arendt’s much-quoted insight from The Origins of Totalitarianism:
In an ever-changing, incomprehensible world the masses had reached the point where they would, at the same time, believe everything and nothing, think that everything was possible and that nothing was true. … Mass propaganda discovered that its audience was ready at all times to believe the worst, no matter how absurd, and did not particularly object to being deceived because it held every statement to be a lie anyhow. The totalitarian mass leaders based their propaganda on the correct psychological assumption that, under such conditions, one could make people believe the most fantastic statements one day, and trust that if the next day they were given irrefutable proof of their falsehood, they would take refuge in cynicism; instead of deserting the leaders who had lied to them, they would protest that they had known all along that the statement was a lie and would admire the leaders for their superior tactical cleverness.
I’m so old I remember when this was considered a purely historical insight, applicable to nations that had, to paraphrase Gen. Corman when he gives Col. Willard his secret mission at the beginning of Apocalypse Now, very obviously gone insane.
Yes sir, very much so, sir. Obviously insane.