President Donald Trump on Sunday tried to justify the fatal US strike on a Venezuelan boat by claiming that 300 million people, presumably Americans, died from drugs last year.
He was out for almost 300 million.
Earlier this month, Trump ordered the military to blow up a Venezuelan boat suspected of carrying drugs to the United States, killing 11.
The move drew criticism on both sides of the aisle.
“I think we probably had the facts right, we had bad people here, but … it’s not our policy just to blow people up,” Republican Sen. Rand Paul said after the attack in the area.
Trump was asked about claims that the attack was illegal on Sunday.
“The drugs that were on the boat and the drugs that are being sent into our country are illegal, and the fact that 300 million people died last year from drugs, that’s what’s illegal,” Trump said.
Trump has a tendency to seemingly pull numbers out of thin air, often wildly exaggerating them based on his needs at any given time. For example, over the summer he claimed to have a 1,500% cut in prescription drug prices that — if true — would drive prices down to a negative number.
His latest claim faces a similar problem: for him to be correct, most of the US population – currently about 340 million – would have to be dead.
The CDC estimates that about 75,000 people died from drug overdoses last year. That’s down from recent years; more than 110,000 died in 2023, but the number has never approached the total Trump has claimed.
Globally, some 600,000 people die each year from drug use, according to the World Health Organization, or 0.2% of what Trump claimed.
Trump’s critics offered a math lesson on X:
