President Donald Trump on Sunday tried to justify the fatal U.S. strike on a Venezuelan boat by claiming that 300 million people, presumably Americans, died from drugs last year.
He was off by 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 probably that we had the facts correct, we got bad people here, but … it isn’t our policy just to blow people up,” Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) said after the attack.
Trump was asked about allegations that the attack was illegal on Sunday.
“What’s illegal are the drugs that were on the boat, and the drugs that are being sent into our country, 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 moment. Over the summer, for example, he claimed he was cutting prescription drug prices by 1,500%, which ― if true ― would bring prices down to negative numbers.
His latest claim faces a similar problem: For him to be correct, most of the U.S population ― currently about 340 million ― would be dead.
The CDC estimates that about 75,000 people died from drug overdoses over the past year. That’s a decline from recent years past; More than 110,000 died in 2023, but the number has never approached the totals Trump claimed.
Globally, some 600,000 people die each year from drug use, according to the World Health Organization, or 0.2% of the number Trump claimed.
Trump’s critics offered a math lesson on X: