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“What do atoms and Donald Trump have in common? They both make up everything” –  message on a homemade protest sign at a March for Science event during the first Trump presidency.

Trump’s propensity for mendacity – for making things up – was on full display last week during his address to the nation on the economy and his past year’s “achievements.” Numerous fact-checking news articles confirm that Trump’s exaggerated claims are mostly false, misleading and based on inaccurate numbers or no actual evidence.

One of his statements was so indicative of his profound ignorance, incompetence and disregard for truth that it requires comment. Trump said, “I negotiated directly with the drug companies...to slash prices on drugs and pharmaceuticals by as much as 400%, 500% and even 600%.” You may think this is just typical Trump exaggerated bluster. But there are are several more serious problems with this false statement.

As pointed out by PolitiFact, “decreases this large are mathematically impossible...A  100% reduction would mean that a consumer would pay nothing for a medicine” (“Fact check: President Trump’s speech on inflation, wages, military dividend,” Poynter Institute, December 18, 2025). You can’t reduce the price of a product more than 100%. No company will pay customers to use a product. Trump – the supposedly rich, “genius” businessman –  doesn’t understand arithmetic or basic statistics.

Economist Dean Baker makes the same mathematical point but also questions why Trump’s advisers and staff did the not correct this embarrassingly inaccurate statement (“Divorced from Reality: Economist Dean Baker Fact-Checks Trump’s Primetime Speech,” Democracy Now, December 18, 2025).
Are his staff equally ignorant or are they too afraid of getting fired to correct Trump’s obvious factual errors?

It is frightening (and embarrassing) that these spineless fools are running our country. Millions of people are being hurt by public policy based on made up, inaccurate numbers and unrealistic thinking.
Health insurance is another example. He recently said, “I want to see the billions of dollars go to people, not to the insurance companies...I want to see the people go out and buy themselves great health care.”
This statement is astonishingly out of touch with reality. How are people going to buy “great health care”? Only the very wealthy can afford to pay the extremely high costs of health care.

People need health insurance (public or private) to access health care. But only the very wealthy can afford to buy health insurance as individuals. This is why the Affordable Care Act (ACA) provides federal subsidies to allow millions of Americans to buy insurance. ACA currently is doing exactly what Trump says he wants. It is giving people money (subsidies) to buy their own health insurance on healthcare “marketplaces.”

Republicans have opposed ACA from the beginning and have repeatedly done everything they can to destroy it. They have no plan to replace it. Today they are again proposing Health Savings Accounts, small business group plan options and pharmacy benefit managers as solutions for high costs. All these have failed to produce significant cost savings in the past. These are not solutions that can replace comprehensive public or private health insurance.

Trump is correct when he says, “I don’t want to give the insurance companies any money. They’ve been ripping off the public for years.”

But the reality is for-profit insurance companies, given their size and political influence, will continue to be heavily involved in every aspect of our broken health care system (including public programs).
Private health insurance is very profitable and the primary reason health care is so expensive. ACA was designed for their benefit and enrichment. Private health insurance is not the solution for affordable health care.

For more than 100 years Republicans have opposed all efforts to create a universal, national health insurance program. Only a national single-payer system can achieve the efficiency and control control needed to provide affordable health care for everyone.

Trump and other Republicans are continuing to “make it up” about immigration and undocumented aliens. Trump’s claims that immigrants are an “invasion” of “violent criminals, rapists, murderers and terrorists” released from “jails and mental institutions” are not true. Google AI tells us, “Fact checks from a wide range of sources, including federal data and independent research, consistently show that Donald Trump’s claims that immigrants are a primary source of crime are false or highly misleading. Criminology research generally indicates that immigrants, both documented and undocumented, commit crimes at a lower rate than native-born U.S. citizens.”

The Marshall Project, a nonpartisan organization of journalists advocating criminal justice reforms,  analyzed thousands of Trump’s statements, identified 13 major claims (some repeated more than 500 times) and found “all of them...false or deeply misleading.”

Even the conservative Cato Institute says out of all immigrants arrested by ICE in 2025, “only 5 percent had a violent criminal convictions.”

A majority of arrested immigrants with a criminal records had only vice, immigration or traffic convictions. Seventy-three percent of arrested immigrants had no criminal records.

What is the cost of Trump’s made up, illegal and inhumane immigration policies?

The 2025-26 federal budget allocated $170 billion for immigration enforcement. Economic studies estimate his goal to deport 10% of undocumented immigrants per year will add $350 billion to the federal deficit in four years. Trump’s illegal deployments of national Guard troops to just a few cities in 2025 are estimated to cost $500 million. None of this includes the economic costs from deporting needed workers across many industries. All this unnecessary spending is for a politically motivated manufactured crisis.

One additional made-up crisis is the Calibri vs Times New Roman font scandal. The Biden administration, motivated by the woke, “discriminatory” DEI concerns, changed the State Department’s official font from Times New Roman to Calibri.

Apparently Calibri is easier for some people with vision disabilities or dyslexia to read. According to Secretary of State Marco Rubio, this resulted in the “degradation of the department’s official correspondence.”

So Calibri is now persona non grata. Apparently no Biden administration action is too petty or insignificant to be ignored.

I will leave you with an appropriate quote from astrophysicist Neil DeGrasse Tyson, “The problem in society is not kids not knowing science. The problem is adults not knowing science ...When you have scientifically illiterate adults you have undermined the very fabric of what makes a nation wealthy and strong.”

We can not thrive as a nation with illiterate adults, who make up their own “alternative facts,” in charge of the country.