Fox News Finally Fact-Checks Trump’s Bizarre Claim About Drug Prices

The White House has finally been called out for fabricating its pharmaceutical savings—and Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick did not handle it well.

For months, Donald Trump has seemingly grabbed numbers out of thin air to impress an ignorant public—or his sycophantic followers—on his allegedly great pharmaceutical deals, boasting that he has “cut drug prices by 1200, 1300, 1400, 1500 percent.”

The lie continued on Wednesday night, when Trump said during his national address he had negotiated to cut drug prices by “400, 500, and even 600 percent.”

But Fox News host John Roberts saw through the numerical gibberish, excoriating Lutnick during an interview Thursday and stressing that the math was simply “not possible.”

“Well, if you cut something by 100 percent the cost goes down to zero,” Roberts said. “If you cut it by 4-, 5-, 600 percent, the drug companies are actually paying you to take their product.

“So tell me, how much of last night’s speech was hyperbole and how much was fact?” the host asked.

But Lutnick’s reply didn’t make much sense, either.

“No, what he’s saying is—bringing—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 said.

“No, it’s not—” Roberts interjected.

“Well, but it’s 700 percent higher price before. It’s down 700 percent now. So, $13 would have to go up 700 percent to get back to the old one. 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 the way you look at it,” Lutnick said, before insisting that the American public “all know what he’s saying.”

“We are hammering the price of drugs down,” Lutnick emphasized.

But the president has not tangibly lowered drug costs. In May, Trump penned an executive order that set a 30-day deadline for drugmakers to negotiate lower prices. If there was no deal, the U.S. would tie its drug prices to the costs set by other countries. But despite that threat, there hasn’t been any noticeable movement in either direction.

In November, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services announced that it had negotiated new prices for 15 expensive drugs covered by Medicare’s prescription drug program, Part D. The negotiations were conducted in the second round of Medicare’s Drug Price Negotiation Program, which was enacted by the previous administration under the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022. Still, the cost of those drugs—which include Ozempic and Wegovy—isn’t expected to decrease until 2027.

Instead, evidence exists that drug prices have actually gone up for some 700 medications during Trump’s second term, according to a September report by the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee.

Trump has previously posited that the affordable price tags on pharmaceuticals in other countries was due to American federal subsidies, which he claimed were financially offsetting their prices. But that’s not reality: The U.S. pays more for drugs because it’s an outlier among high-income, first-world countries, which predominantly support universal public health coverage.

Potential solutions that researchers argue could meaningfully address high drug prices in the U.S. include restricting pharmaceutical monopolies within the country, reworking insurance benefits to hamper out-of-pocket expenses, and recentralizing price negotiations through the leverage of a single-payer system (such as Australia, Germany, the U.K., or any number of other wealthy nations), according to a report by the Commonwealth Fund, a private American foundation focused on health care reform.

While signing an executive order to reclassify the status of marijuana Thursday, Donald Trump struggled to stay awake in the Oval Office. 

The anti-woke president, seated at the Resolute Desk, was surrounded by medical professionals and military veterans, among others, but his neck still drooped with his eyes closing before he jerked awake. 

Even as doctors extolled the benefits from having more research opportunities and medical applications for cannabis, Trump had difficulty keeping his eyes open, having to shift in his seat in order to stay awake.  

Not even the dulcet tones of Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. could keep Trump from dozing, as he had to shift and look up while Kennedy was speaking to interrupt his drifts in and out of consciousness. 

Trump has been caught snoozing at his military parade, Cabinet meetings, a tennis match, meeting the Saudi Crown Prince, during Pope Francis’s funeral, and even during the signing of a peace agreement. But don’t tell Dozy Don that his age, cognitive ability, or health may be an issue: The president gets very upset when the media points out the obvious. Maybe retirement and sleeping to his heart’s content is what he needs. 

Attacking Venezuela was not the original game plan. Instead, internal reports suggest that the White House’s violent boat-smashing operation in the Caribbean was merely a backup plan when a potential war on Mexico fell through.

The Trump administration—namely, deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller—had planned to spark a new war on drugs in the early stages of Donald Trump’s second term. That effort would have targeted Mexican cartels and alleged drug traffickers.

But as the administration geared up for the fight, sending troops to the southern border, Mexico did the same. By the end of August, Mexico had effectively cracked down on the cartels.

Still hungry for a fight, Miller pivoted, shifting his gaze toward Venezuela, The Washington Post reported Thursday.

“When you hope and wait for something to develop that doesn’t, you start looking at countries south of Mexico,” a current U.S. official told the Post on the condition of anonymity.

So far, at least 95 people have been killed since the attacks began in early September. The White House has defended the violence, chalking it up to allegedly necessary efforts to thwart the pipeline of fentanyl into the country. To further justify the brutality, the president designated fentanyl as a “weapon of mass destruction” earlier this week, ostensibly legitimizing the militaristic response. Trump has simultaneously leveraged the aggression to try to shove Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro out of power, something that he attempted and failed to do in 2019.

Current and former officials that spoke with the Post argued that Miller was the primary driving force behind the operation, leading the charge on a July 25 classified directive that authorized the use of military force against criminal groups.

“The president’s memo is the original sin of the whole operation,” a former official told the Post.

But the White House is not on board with the leaking details that Miller masterminded Trump’s merciless foreign policy.

“President Trump’s counternarcotics policies come from President Trump himself,” White House spokeswoman Anna Kelly said. “All senior administration officials work closely together to carry out the agenda President Trump was elected to implement, including eliminating the scourge of narco-terrorism that takes tens of thousands of American lives every year.”

But lawmakers have remained skeptical as to whether the boats even qualify as a narcoterrorist threat, considering the White House has been dropping bombs without investigating or interdicting the watercraft.

Their skepticism was rewarded Wednesday, when Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and State Secretary Marco Rubio revealed during a classified meeting that there was no intelligence indicating that fentanyl was coming out of Venezuela. Instead, the administration had learned the boats were carrying cocaine—bound for Europe, rather than America.

“That is a massive waste of national security resources and your taxpayer dollars,” said Connecticut Senator Chris Murphy, who attended the meeting.

Democrats on the House Oversight Committee released new photos from Jeffrey Epstein’s estate Thursday, and in some of them, handwritten lines from the book Lolita are visible on the bodies of unidentified girls or women.

One of the photos shows “Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth” written on someone’s collarbone, above her chest. A passage on a foot reads, “She was Lo, plain Lo, in the morning, standing four feet ten in one sock.” “She was Lola in slacks” is visible on another person’s body, and a message written on someone’s neck reads, “She was Dolly at school.” And visible, written vertically along a person’s back, is the line, “She was Delores on the dotted line.”

The photos were released through a Dropbox account, and nothing in the upload indicates who the photos are of or when they were taken. Lolita, written in 1955 by Vladimir Nabakov, is about a professor who kidnaps and sexually abuses a 12-year-old girl, which seems on the nose for a convicted sex offender and trafficker like Epstein.

Other photos released Thursday include redacted passports from Ukraine, Czech Republic, and Russia, as well as new photos of New York Times columnist David Brooks. There are also additional photos of Noam Chomsky, Bill Gates, Sergey Brin, Woody Allen, and Bill Gates, following earlier releases of photos with them.

In response to the photos, The New York Times issued a statement reading, “As a journalist, David Brooks regularly attends events to speak with noted and important business leaders to inform his columns, which is exactly what happened at this 2011 event. Mr. Brooks had no contact with him before or after this single attendance at a widely-attended dinner.”

This release comes just one day before the Trump administration is required to release its full archive of Epstein documents from its federal investigation into the billionaire sex trafficker. House Speaker Mike Johnson has sent legislators home a day early, probably to try to avoid negative attention. Regarding tomorrow’s release, however, there’s no telling how much of the files the White House will try to redact or keep hidden.

View the latest batch of photos released by the House Oversight Democrats here.

The Kennedy Center will soon be called the “Trump-Kennedy Center,” in yet another egotistical move from the president that could be a death knell for the famed American cultural institution.

“I have just been informed that the highly respected Board of the Kennedy Center, some of the most successful people from all parts of the world, have just voted unanimously to rename the Kennedy Center to the Trump-Kennedy Center, because of the unbelievable work President Trump has done over the last year in saving the building,” White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt wrote Thursday on X. “Not only from the standpoint of its reconstruction, but also financially, and its reputation. Congratulations to President Donald J. Trump, and likewise, congratulations to President Kennedy, because this will be a truly great team long into the future! The building will no doubt attain new levels of success and grandeur.”

The current Kennedy Center Board of Trustees contains Trump himself and MAGA sycophants like Fox News host Laura Ingraham, White House deputy chief of staff Dan Scavino, Allison Lutnick (wife of Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick), Trump’s U.S. Ambassador to India Sergio Gor, and Attorney General Pam Bondi.

Trump has taken aim at the Kennedy Center since his return to office, firing the entire board, complaining that the performances were too woke, claiming that the building was dilapidated, and watching ticket sales plummet in the process.

This story has been updated.