Lies, damned lies, and Trumpism

Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick has attempted to explain President Donald Trump’s “mathematically impossible” claim that he is cutting drug prices by up to 600 percent after being grilled by a Fox News host.

During Trump’s Wednesday night address to the nation, where he pushed a number of mistruths and exaggerations, the president claimed he has negotiated with drug companies to cut prices by “as much as 400, 500 and even 600 percent.”

Reducing costs by 100 percent would mean that a customer gets their medication for free, a fact host John Roberts put to Lutnick on Fox News.

“Well, if you cut something by 100 percent, the cost goes down to zero,” Roberts said. “If you cut it by four or five or 600 percent, the drug companies are actually paying you to take their product. So it raises the question, how much of last night’s speech was hyperbole and how much was fact?”

Lutnick let out a laugh during the question and said “no.” He said that the figures “depend on when you look at it.”

“What he’s saying is…if a drug was $100 and you bring the drug down to $13 right? If you’re looking at it from $13 it’s down seven times…” Lutnick attempted to explain in a rambling response.

“It’s 700 percent higher [than] before, it’s down 700 percent now, right? So $13 would have to go up 700 percent to get back to the old one,” Lutnick continued. “So it all depends on when you look at it.

“You could say it’s down 87 percent or you could say…it would have to go up 700 percent to be the same one. So it just depends on what you look at it,” he repeated. “But basically what he’s saying, and we all know what he’s saying, is we are hammering the price of drugs down.”

I doubt Trump understands even the most elementary statistical concepts, but what I’m certain about is that he doesn’t care about whether he’s saying is true, or even minimally coherent. (Of course on top of the fantasy math concepts, there’s no evidence that drug prices in general have even declined).

He’s a bullshitting real estate con man trying to make the sale, and saying whatever he thinks needs to say to close the deal. That’s all he’s ever been, and the cynicism this engenders in the public (all politicians lie; Trump just doesn’t bother to pretend that he doesn’t) is one of the worst consequences of the essentially totalitarian mindset that the Trumpist cult engenders.

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.

Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism