President Donald Trump points to his head as he responds to a reporter's question on gun control during a lengthy press conference on the South Lawn of the White House in Washington, DC, on August 9, 2019.

WASHINGTON — US President Donald Trump, who has repeatedly bragged about how smart he is, apparently has trouble with basic arithmetic, having asserted a mystifying lie about drug prices several times now.

“You know, we’ve cut drug prices by 1200, 1300, 1400, 1500%. I don’t mean 50%, I mean 1400, 1500%,” he told reporters on Sunday before boarding Air Force One to return to the White House following another weekend of golf at his New Jersey course.

He had made the same false claim 12 days earlier at a reception for Republican members of Congress: “We’re going to get the drug prices down — 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 declaration, of course, is absurd on its face.

A product becomes free if the sale price is lowered by 100%. To reduce the cost of a prescription drug beyond that implies that the customer would actually receive a rebate to take the medication off the pharmacy’s hands.

Trump’s “1500%” claim would mean that a patient would receive a prescription that normally costs $100 for nothing, along........

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