- By Marc Sandalow | Special to The Examiner
- 16 hrs ago (SFExaminer.com)
Here’s something for “reckless, feckless and defeatist” haters of President Donald Trump to ponder now that algebra is back in San Francisco’s middle schools.
Trump repeatedly boasts of reducing drug prices by 600%, sometimes as much as 1,500% — a seeming mathematical impossibility. Last week his health secretary, Robert Kennedy Jr., came to his defense twice, once in testimony before Congress and once before reporters in the Oval Office, insisting that Trump’s claim is one of “two ways of calculating” percentages.
Those who understand basic arithmetic ridicule the assertion as “MAGA math.” It conjures up the twisted reality portrayed in George Orwell’s “Nineteen Eighty-Four,” in which fear arises that Big Brother will declare that two plus two is five.
But what if the critics could be proven wrong? With apologies to those who understand mathematics on a much higher level than I do, here’s one explanation supporting Big Brother’s calculation.
Let’s start with something everyone can agree on: 0 = 0.
And you don’t need algebra to know that any number subtracted from itself is zero. Which means, in algebraic terms, x – x = 0. Or, x – x = x – x.
Furthermore, any number multiplied by zero equals zero. So, it is also true that 4(x – x) = 5(x – x) is a mathematically sound equation.
Now comes the more complicated calculation, which will soon be introduced to San Francisco eighth graders. In algebra, one way to simplify an equation is by dividing each side by an identical number.
So, divide both sides by x – x and you end up with 4 = 5. And if 4 equals five, then 2 + 2 = 5.
Perhaps Big Brother, Trump and Kennedy are right!
Kennedy, who holds degrees from Harvard and the University of Virginia and attended the London School of Economics, insisted that his boss’s math was accurate.
“If a drug was $100 and its price rose to $600, that would be a 600% increase” Kennedy said last week (that’s actually a 500% increase, but who’s counting?). “If it drops from $600 to $100, that would be a 600% savings.”
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“Right,” the president proclaimed.
Actually, that’s wrong, as most eighth-graders could tell them. You can’t divide by zero. And prices can’t fall by more than 100%.
Say a 300-pound man balloons up to 600 pounds. That’s a 100% increase. But if drops back to 300 pounds, he hasn’t lost 100% of his weight. If he had, he’d be gone.
Though it might be confusing to some — including Trump and Kennedy — going from 300 to 600 is a 100% increase. Falling from 600 to 300 is a 50% decrease.
Of course, haggling over numbers is only important if you are concerned about reality. And reality, as comedian Stephen Colbert once observed, “has a well-known liberal bias.”
Were Trump or Kennedy making an honest mistake, they would correct themselves. But assertions such as “the U.S. has already won the war in Iran,” or that prices have plummeted since Joe Biden was president, or that the U.S. economy is the hottest in the world are not meant to fact-checked.
“This is the problem with the media,” Trump’s first campaign manager, Corey Lewandowski, said after the 2016 election. “You guys took everything that Donald Trump said so literally. The American people didn’t. They understood it.”
And the White House is counting on Americans not understanding algebra.
In the final season of the HBO comedy series “Veep,” the buffoonish Jonah Ryan insists he has more delegates than the math shows in his quixotic run for the presidency. He then learns that algebra was developed by Muslims in the 9th century.
“How do you explain that when I add up my delegates — with Christian math — the number is quite different?” he says, vowing to end the teaching of “Sharia math” in schools.
Americans have grown accustomed to MAGA math. It explains how Trump’s victory over Kamala Harris in 2024 by a margin of 1.5 percentage points was a “historic landslide,” how Washington, D.C., no longer has crime, or how such an unpopular president can have a “100% approval rating.”
And if bringing algebra back to eighth grade doesn’t make believers out of them, perhaps the White House can find alternate facts that will.
