Fact check: Five false numbers Trump used at one event

By Daniel Dale, CNN

(CNN) — President Donald Trump uses a lot of inaccurate numbers. Sometimes, like on Thursday, he uses a bunch of them in rapid succession.

At a White House event at which he announced sharply reduced prices for some common fertility drugs through a new direct-to-consumer platform, Trump:

• Again falsely claimed he is cutting prescription drug prices by a mathematically impossible 200% to 800%
• Again falsely claimed he has secured “over $17 trillion” in investment in the US this year, nearly double the White House’s exaggerated “$8.8 trillion” figure
• Again falsely claimed he has ended “eight” wars; this figure counts two disputes that weren’t actually wars and one war that is still running
• Falsely claimed Democrats are trying during the government shutdown battle to give $1.5 trillion to undocumented immigrants, though that is not close to true
• Falsely claimed the prevalence of autism was just 1 in 20,000 just “20 years ago or so,” though the actual figure about 20 years ago was between 1 in 125 and 1 in 110

Here is a fact check.

Prescription drug prices

Trump claimed, as he has repeatedly this year, that he is cutting prescription drug prices by well over 100%. This time, he said, “Drug prices are coming down 400%, 200%, 600%, numbers that nobody’s ever seen before,” then added later, “Five hundred, 600, 800%, in some cases even more than that. It’s hard to believe.”

It’s hard to believe because those numbers are mathematically impossible, as CNN and others have repeatedly noted. If Trump magically got companies to reduce the prices of all of their drugs to $0, that would be a 100% cut. A cut of 200% to 800% would mean that Americans would be paid money to acquire their medications, which is not happening.

At the same event, Dr. Mehmet Oz, Trump’s administrator for the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, made a claim about the price of one common fertility drug being reduced from $242 to $10, and said, “I don’t know what the math is on that. We can’t even calculate it. It’s a lot. It’s too high to calculate without a more studied approach.” But it’s not too high to calculate; it’s a 95.9% cut, a good example of how the president’s own numbers do not make sense.

Investment in the US

Trump twice repeated his regular claim that, this year alone, he has secured “over $17 trillion” in investment in the US. “I think one of the great numbers that I’ve ever heard. Think of it. Over $17 trillion being invested in our country,” he said at one point.

But the “great number” is fiction.

The White House’s own website says there have been “$8.8 trillion” in “major investment announcements” this term. A White House spokesperson wouldn’t explain why the president keeps using the much larger “$17 trillion.” And an item-by-item CNN review of the White House’s list found that even the “$8.8 trillion” figure is a major exaggeration.

The White House is counting trillions of dollars in vague investment pledges; pledges that are about “bilateral trade,” “investments and trade” or “economic exchange” rather than strictly investment in the US; and vague statements that don’t even rise to the level of being actual pledges. You can read more here.

Trump and wars

Trump said, “I don’t know of anybody that ended wars. I ended eight of them.” While Trump has certainly played a significant role in resolving some conflicts at least temporarily, notably including this month’s Gaza ceasefire, his “eight” figure is wrong.

Trump and the White House have previously explained that his list of eight supposed resolved wars includes one between Egypt and Ethiopia, but that wasn’t actually a war. It was a long-running and still-unresolved diplomatic dispute about a major Ethiopian dam project on a tributary of the Nile River.

Trump’s list of wars ended includes another supposed war that didn’t actually occur during his presidency, between Serbia and Kosovo. He has sometimes claimed to have prevented the eruption of a new war between those two entities, providing few details about what he meant, but that is different than settling an actual war.

And Trump’s list also includes a supposed success in ending a war involving the Democratic Republic of Congo and Rwanda, but that war has continued despite a peace agreement brokered by the Trump administration this year – which was never signed by the primary rebel coalition doing the fighting.

The shutdown and undocumented immigrants

Trump, criticizing Democrats over the ongoing government shutdown, claimed, “They want to spend $1.5 trillion on illegal immigrants and they want to destroy health care for everyone else.”

Leaving aside the subjective but dubious claim that Democrats are seeking to destroy others’ health care – Democrats are proposing to reverse Trump-approved cuts to Medicaid and other health programs and extend the enhanced pandemic-era Obamacare subsidies that are scheduled to expire at the end of the year – they are not proposing to spend $1.5 trillion on undocumented immigrants. Undocumented people are not eligible for either Obamacare subsidies or federal Medicaid insurance coverage (hospitals are required to provide people with emergency care regardless of immigration status or ability to pay).

The Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, a fiscal watchdog group, estimated that the spending proposal the Democrats released in September would add $1.5 trillion to the debt over the next decade. But that figure is not about undocumented people in particular. And the White House itself has claimed that Democrats are proposing to spend about $193 billion – much less than Trump’s “$1.5 trillion” – on health care for “illegal immigrants and other non-citizens,” the emphasis ours. The White House published an itemized list that makes clear that even by its own contested calculations, the majority of even that smaller sum would be for these “other non-citizens” who are in the US legally.

The prevalence of autism

There’s no doubt that the known prevalence of autism among children has spiked in the last 20 years, which experts have attributed in large part to greater awareness of the symptoms and improvements in diagnostic practices. But Trump has repeatedly exaggerated the extent of the increase, and he did so again Thursday.

“It used to be 1 in 20,000 – and that was not that long ago, 20 years ago or so,” he said.

In reality, the known prevalence of autism among children “20 years ago or so” was much higher than Trump claimed. It was 1 in 125 in 2004 and 1 in 110 in 2006, according to figures published online by the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Even 25 years ago, in 2000, it was 1 in 150.

Some of the earliest studies on the subject, from the 1960s and 1970s, estimated autism prevalence to be in the range of 2 to 4 per 10,000 children, but that was much longer ago than “20 years ago or so.”

Trump cited a variety of figures on Thursday for the supposed current prevalence of autism, saying it is “1 in 12, 1 in 28, 1 in 32; there’s a couple of different numbers out there.” The CDC’s most recent published prevalence, for 2022, is 1 in 31.

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