Playing the percentages
January 22, 2026 at 3:19 PM by Dr. Drang
In his excessively long speech to the World Economic Forum yesterday in Davos, Donald Trump did some surprising backtracking. Not the stuff about Iceland Greenland, but on his method of calculating price reductions.
For weeks—maybe months, time has been hard to judge this past year—Trump has been telling us that he’s worked out deals with pharmaceutical companies to lower their prices by several hundred percent. Commentators and comedians have pointed out that you can’t reduce prices more than 100% and pretty much left it at that, suggesting that Trump’s impossible numbers are due to ignorance.
Don’t get me wrong. Trump’s ignorance is nearly limitless—but only nearly. I’ve always thought that he knew the right way to calculate a price drop; he did it the wrong way so he could quote a bigger number. And that came out in yesterday’s speech:
The embedding code is supposed to start the video just after the 47-minute mark. If it doesn’t, that’s where you should scroll to.
If you can’t stand listening to him for even 15 seconds, here’s what he said:
Under my most-favored nation policy for drug prices, the cost of prescription drugs is coming down by up to 90%, depending on the way you calculate. You could also say 5-, 6-, 7-, 800%. There are two ways of figuring that.
Apparently, Trump or his staff decided that this particular audience wouldn’t swallow his usual percentage calculation, so he decided to do it the right way, even though he went on to defend his usual method. Trump has testified that his net worth is whatever he feels it should be on a given day, so why wouldn’t there be more than one way to calculate a price drop?
It’s hard to know what goes on in Donald Trump’s head, but I’m confident of two things:
- He knows that price increases and decreases are opposites. Therefore, if a price jump from $10 to $100 is a 900% increase, then a price drop from $100 to $10 must be a 900% decrease. It’s just logic.
- If you were selling him something and agreed to lower your price from $100 to $10, he would call it a 90% decrease, not a 900% decrease. If he were giving you the same discount (ha!), it would be a 900% decrease. The numbers he uses are whatever sound best to him at the time.
Of course, the key thing about Trump’s deals with drug companies isn’t how percentages are calculated; it’s whether these deals will have any real effect.