U.S. President Donald Trump speaks to the media before boarding Marine One upon departure for New York, in Washington, D.C., U.S., September 11, 2025. REUTERS/Evelyn Hockstein
Donald Trump and his MAGA allies repeatedly make claims that abuse basic math and break from reality, according to one mathematician and Harvard, who wrote on Thursday that the administration's lofty claims shatter both truth and "mathematical possibility."
Aubrey Clayton is a PhD mathematician who teaches subjects like probability, statistics and philosophy at Harvard University. Writing in an op-ed for the New York Times, he called out Trump and his allies for their use of numbers and statistics, which he claimed were divorced from reality and used only to make their arguments sound bigger.
As a prime example, Clayton cited Trump's oft-repeated claims about how much he has brought down prescription drug prices. While the reality of those price drops is debatable on their own, the president has claimed multiple times to have them down by percentages well over 100. Most recently, he claimed a 600 percent drop during his State of the Union address. As Clayton pointed out, since a 100 percent drop in price would make the drugs free, Trump's claims "would require a pharmaceutical company to pay you five times over to take a medication."
"From the perspective of a math educator, this is not a minor abuse of statistics but a failure of epistemic responsibility, one that undermines the possibility of public reasoning itself," Clayton wrote, later adding that these claims were meant to "short-circuit" public debate about his policies.
Clayton further highlighted Attorney General Pam Bondi's claim that Trump's anti-fentanyl policies had "saved 119 million American lives (later revised to 258 million)," a number only matched by the deadliest plagues in human history. He contested Trump's claim that his tariffs had created $18 trillion in new investments for the U.S., "which would represent a rate of economic growth that dwarfed even the greatest periods of post-World War II expansion." He also noted Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem's claim that the agency could deport up to 100 million people, despite that being roughly double the actual number of immigrants in the U.S.
"Elementary number sense and some understanding of the world reveal that these numbers are grossly out of scale," Clayton argued, later adding, "These numbers go beyond plausibly being true to being inconsistent with known mathematical axioms and definitions."
Clayton concluded his arguments by suggesting that Trump's use of "absurd" statistical claims shows his disdain for the intelligence of Americans, since he does not expect them to be smart enough to debunk them.
"We can and must hold our political leaders to a higher standard," he wrote. "When officials use absurd numbers, it shows that they believe that Americans are incapable of critiquing them."