In the spring, after U.S. officials seized a series of fentanyl shipments headed for the United States, Attorney General Pam Bondi didn’t just boast about the accomplishment — she also tried to credit Donald Trump in an unfortunate way.
Thanks to the president, Bondi said, recent fentanyl seizures would save “258 million lives.” Given that the current U.S. population is over 340 million people, the attorney general apparently wanted people to believe that fentanyl-laced pills had been poised to kill roughly three-quarters of the American population, which didn’t make a lot of sense.
This came to mind over the weekend because Bondi apparently isn’t the only one who’s struggling with drug-related math. HuffPost reported:
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.
During a brief Q&A, a reporter noted that the president of Venezuela has argued that the U.S. military strike on a Venezuelan boat was “illegal.” Trump replied, “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.”
So, a few things.
First, the actual number of people who died in the U.S. from drug overdoses last year was roughly 75,000. That total is a tragedy, and officials have a responsibility to take steps to reduce avoidable fatalities — but the gap between 75,000 and 300 million is enormous.
Second, I realize that Trump’s approach to statistics and arithmetic has been a mess for many years, but it really ought to occur to him that such an exaggeration sounds absurd, since illicit drugs did not kill nearly 90% of the U.S. population in 2024. (Bill Lueders recently wrote for The Bulwark, “Whatever the claim, the president has the numbers to prove it, even if he has to make them up.”)
But let’s not overlook a substantive element to the underlying point: The president still can’t defend the legality of the military strike he approved.
There are standard procedures when U.S. officials suspect a boat of carrying drugs. The process involves stopping and searching the vessel, seizing actual drugs and arresting and questioning those on board. Two weeks ago, however, the Trump administration did not follow standard procedures when it saw a boat with suspected Venezuelan drug smugglers.
Instead, the administration launched a military strike that killed 11 people in international waters.
Were the 11 people on the boat actually members of the Tren de Aragua gang, as the president claimed? We don’t know. Were there actual drugs on the boat? We don’t know that, either. Was it legal for the Trump administration to use lethal force against a civilian boat in international waters? There’s reason to believe it was not.
When JD Vance was told that the operation might’ve been a war crime, the vice president replied, “I don’t give a s— what you call it.”
Complicating matters, The New York Times reported that the boat in question “had altered its course and appeared to have turned around before the attack started.” And while the reporting hasn’t been independently verified by MSNBC or NBC News, that raises the possibility that U.S. officials, acting on the president’s order, launched a deadly military strike against civilians who were retreating — making it that much more difficult to characterize the boat as an imminent threat.
As Senate Democrats press the White House for answers, Trump and his team have had two weeks to come up with some sensible answers. So far, they don’t appear to have come up with anything but a preposterous statistic.
This post updates our related earlier coverage.
This article was originally published on MSNBC.com
