LEILA FADEL, HOST:
President Trump uses a lot of numbers. When he rallied Republican members of the House earlier this week, he used the word percent more than 30 times. And as NPR senior White House correspondent Tamara Keith reports, some of his numbers are mathematically impossible.
TAMARA KEITH, BYLINE: President Trump regularly boasts about the success of airstrikes on accused drug boats near Venezuela, but his numbers have changed repeatedly. Here he is in chronological order over the past month.
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PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: Ninety-two or 94% down in drugs coming in by the sea.
We've cut it down 96%. Think of that.
Ninety-two percent.
Ninety-six percent.
Ninety-four percent.
Ninety-six point two percent coming into the United States - 92.6 by sea.
You know, it's 97%. I'm trying to figure out who are the other 3%.
KEITH: He always makes that same joke, too. The White House declined to cite the source or offer an explanation for these shifting numbers. Glenn Kessler led The Fact Checker project at The Washington Post for 15 years.
GLENN KESSLER: We often will just make stuff up. I mean, it's a consistent pattern.
KEITH: In Trump's first term, Kessler documented more than 30,000 false or misleading statements by the president, and many of them involved numbers.
KESSLER: You always want to have a statistic.
KEITH: Trump also loves to talk about bringing down the cost of prescription drugs.
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TRUMP: Some prescription drug and pharmaceutical prices will be reduced almost immediately by 50 to 80 to 90%.
KEITH: That was in May. Since then, the claims have ballooned.
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TRUMP: And we're not talking about a 25% cut or 50, we're talking about a 1,500% cut.
KEITH: Fifteen hundred percent. But math can sometimes be tricky. So I dialed up a math teacher. Kirk Weiler taught high school mathematics and became internet-famous with his more than 400 instructional videos. He said what Trump is claiming doesn't make sense when you're talking about the cost of a product.
KIRK WEILER: If you had a drug that went down from a hundred dollars by 200%, then the drug would have to cost negative $100, implying, of course, that the drug companies were paying people to take the drug, which would be awesome.
KEITH: Awesome, but that isn't what's happening. And in remarks earlier this week, Trump let on that he knew there might be an issue with his numbers.
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TRUMP: Depending on the way you calculate it, it could be thousands of percent down. It could also be 90% and 80%. You know, there's two ways of calculate. I don't know if you know. They said, Donald Trump exaggerate - no, there are two ways of calculating it.
KEITH: I played that clip for Weiler.
WEILER: Wow (laughter).
KEITH: And he said there really is only one way to calculate percentage decrease.
WEILER: Of all the things that are debatable, this is just simply not one of them.
KEITH: Responding to questions, White House spokesman Kush Desai didn't explain the president's math, but did say, quote, "President Trump has correctly identified how Americans pay several times more for the exact same drugs as their peers in other wealthy nations." (ph) Kessler, the fact-checker, says other presidents were more precise about their language and the numbers they cited because what a president says matters.
Tamara Keith, NPR News.
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