by Jarvis DeBerry | Apr 25, 2026 | Opinion, Politics
“There’s two ways of calculating a percentage,” Health and Human Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said Wednesday to Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., at a U.S. Senate Finance Committee hearing. Warren had rightly dismissed President Donald Trump’s claim that he had lowered drug prices by up to 600%, and she demanded some “real math.” But Kennedy, out of either ignorance or shameless sycophancy to Trump, shot back with some MAGA math. “If you have a $600 drug, and you reduce it to $10,” Kennedy said, “that’s a 600% reduction.”
No, it’s not. This point can’t be stressed enough in case there’s a middle schooler reading the opinion page: No! It’s just not.
Kennedy, out of either ignorance or shameless sycophancy to Trump, shot back with some MAGA math.
If the price of a drug were reduced from $600 to $10, that would be a 98.3% decrease. A 600% reduction, Warren said, “means companies should be paying you to take their drugs.” While such a reduction would be a significant and beneficial policy change, Warren repeated a point that Democrats have been making for months: Several of the name-brand drugs at the TrumpRx website, even at lower prices, still cost considerably more than their generic equivalents.
Kennedy didn’t come up with the 600% nonsense himself. Trump has consistently claimed that he’s reduced the price of drugs by many times more than the price of those drugs. Kennedy’s maddening repetition of pseudo-math may be the most glaring sign of a broader problem: that the president has completely surrounded himself with yes-men during this term. Apparently, nobody has dared to tell him he’s wrong. Instead, they’re standing around
by Steve Benen | Apr 24, 2026 | Maddowblog, News, Politics
Amid widespread concerns about the struggling economy, a deadly and destabilizing war that hasn’t gone according to the White House’s plans and a burgeoning global energy crisis, recent polling has found two-thirds of Americans are convinced their unpopular president simply has the wrong priorities. Donald Trump could take steps to change their minds, but he apparently doesn’t want to.
On the contrary, the Republican appears far more interested assorted renovation projects than his actual governing responsibilities. The New York Times reported:
Next up on President Trump’s renovation tour of Washington, D.C.: the Lincoln Memorial reflecting pool, which he called ‘filthy’ and ‘dirty’ and in need of a major upgrade.
Mr. Trump said on Thursday that the project was already underway to renovate the reflecting pool, which is more than 2,000 feet long and has been the site of many historic events, including Martin Luther King Jr.’s ‘I Have a Dream’ speech.
At a White House event ostensibly about health care, Trump strayed from the topic to talk about the reflecting pool between the Washington and Lincoln memorials, taking time to argue that he “actually had more people” when he spoke at a July 4 event at the reflecting pool than MLK did when he delivered his “I Have a Dream” speech in 1963. (“I have pictures of Martin Luther King’s crowd and my crowd,” the president said.)
Why make such a claim? Because Trump is who he appears to be.
The president went on to describe a situation in which he, relying on his experience as a developer who has built many swimming pools, rejected a contractor’s claim that removing the pool’s granite and replacing it with
by Steve Benen | Apr 24, 2026 | Maddowblog, News, Politics
At a White House event last summer, Donald Trump boasted, “We’re going to get the drug prices down — not 30% or 40%, which would be great. Not 50% or 60%. No, we’re going to get them down 1,000%, 600%, 500%, 1,500%.”
The president added that “nobody else” was capable of such a feat, adding that he would produce “numbers that are not even thought to be achievable.”
Oddly enough, he had a point — but not the one he was trying to make.
Trump continued to wage a losing fight over arithmetic in the months that followed, and this week, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. did his best to defend the president, arguing during a congressional hearing that Trump “has a different way of calculating percentages.” The secretary, who did not appear to be kidding, added, “If you have a $600 drug and you reduce it to $10, that’s a 600% reduction.”
The obvious problem with this is that Kennedy’s math was plainly incorrect, and while the American presidency is powerful, it does not include the authority to concoct “a different way of calculating percentages.” (The headline on The New York Times’ report on the testimony summarized the matter nicely: “RFK Jr. Defends Trump’s Mathematically Impossible Drug Discount Claims.”)
Two days after the hearing, the fight continued at an event in the Oval Office. The Associated Press reported:
President Donald Trump, who helped push the term ‘fake news’ into the mainstream, now seems to have a new favorite subject: fake math.
During a Thursday event announcing a deal with drugmaker Regeneron to lower the cost of its pharmaceutical products, Trump defended his
by Steve Benen | Apr 24, 2026 | Maddowblog, News, Politics
The first sign of trouble emerged before Donald Trump returned to the White House. Five days before Inauguration Day 2025, Pam Bondi appeared before a Senate committee for her confirmation hearing, and Sen. Dick Durbin broached a subject that she’d had eight weeks to prepare for: The Illinois Democrat asked who won the 2020 presidential election.
Bondi refused to answer directly, saying only that Joe Biden was the incumbent president.
Soon after, during the same hearing, Democratic Sen. Mazie Hirono of Hawaii also asked the prospective nominee who won the 2020 election. She again refused to say, replying, “Joe Biden is the president of the United States.”
The issue was especially relevant to Bondi’s nomination, since she’d personally championed baseless conspiracy theories after Trump’s defeat, lied to the public about having uncovered “evidence of cheating” and “fake ballots” and even participated in the infamous Four Seasons Total Landscaping fiasco.
But the Florida Republican’s refusal to answer the basic question was also a sign of things to come. In the weeks and months that followed, Democrats continued to ask Trump nominees who won the 2020 race, and those nominees continued to pretend not to understand how to answer the question.
We saw fresh evidence of the phenomenon earlier this week, when Democratic Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts asked Kevin Warsh, the nominee to serve as the next chair of the Federal Reserve, whether Warsh was willing to acknowledge the reality of Trump’s 2020 defeat. He was only willing to say that the Senate had “certified” the results of the election, which was a rather pitiful dodge.
ELIZABETH WARREN: Did Donald Trump lose the 2020 election? KEVIN WARSH:
by Jarvis DeBerry | Apr 23, 2026 | Opinion, Politics
We’re awaiting the Supreme Court’s decision in Louisiana v. Callais, a case about how to draw congressional maps that may bring Chief Justice John Roberts’ final blow against a Voting Rights Act he already weakened. But in the meantime, the Louisiana Legislature has been engaged in an even more transparent attempt to diminish Black political strength. In November, 68% of voters in the majority-Black city of New Orleans chose as clerk of criminal district court Calvin Duncan, a jailhouse lawyer who was imprisoned for 28 years for a murder he didn’t commit. In what is the first legislative session since then, white lawmakers far removed from New Orleans (politically if not geographically) both chambers have now voted to eliminate the office that Duncan won before he can occupy it.
We can count on the state Senate approving some minor amendments to the bill — perhaps as early as Monday — and Gov. Jeff Landry has promised to sign the bill once it reaches his desk.
The Louisiana Legislature is making an even more transparent attempt to diminish Black political strength.
For the past two presidential cycles, many Democrats have argued that “democracy is on the ballot.” The implication was that Donald Trump represented a grave threat to the future of our republic. And Trump’s pardoning of Jan. 6 insurrectionists, his vote-throttling SAVE Act, his moves against birthright citizenship, his hypocritical stance against mail-in voting and his administration’s refusal to swear off sending immigration officers to the polls in November are all signs that he is hostile to full participation in democracy. And Roberts, who has had it in for the Voting Rights Act
by Steve Benen | Apr 23, 2026 | Maddowblog, News, Politics
One of the oddities of Donald Trump’s personnel choices in his second term is how often he has chosen failed GOP candidates for important positions. Indeed, the White House seems to be a jobs program for Republicans who’ve been rejected by voters, hiring so many failed candidates that Roll Call last year said the president had created a “Team of Losers.”
This week, that list grew a little longer, as Hung Cao took the reins at the U.S. Navy, replacing former Navy Secretary John Phelan, who was fired Wednesday by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth. Cao is known to campaign watchers as a Virginia Republican who ran a failed congressional campaign in 2022, losing to then-Democratic Rep. Jennifer Wexton by nearly seven points, followed by a failed Senate campaign in 2024, losing to Democratic Sen. Tim Kaine by nearly nine points.
Just months after Cao’s defeat, Trump tapped the Republican to serve as undersecretary of the Navy, and he was narrowly confirmed last fall. Now, he’s the acting Navy secretary, the 10th person to serve in the position across both of Trump’s terms.
Cao’s record, however, is not without controversy. During his 2024 candidacy, for example, USA Today reported that the Republican, a decorated Navy veteran, “made repeated references to becoming disabled after he was ‘blown up’ in combat,” although his military record did not support those claims.
The article added that Cao’s Navy service record “does not show a Purple Heart award, the commendation given to troops who have suffered wounds from ‘direct or indirect result of enemy action’ that required medical attention. Nor does his record indicate that he received the Navy’s Combat
