Recently, several videos went viral in which RFK Jr. displayed a troubling grasp of how math works.
During the April 22 Senate Finance Committee hearing, he claimed that a decrease in drug prices from $600 to $10 represents a 600% reduction.
The next day, standing behind the President in the Oval Office, RFK doubles down. "If the drug was $100 and it raised the price to $600 that would be a 600% rise," he said. "If it drops from $600 to $100, that's a 600% savings.” (Though you can’t double down on an entirely different equation, using $10 in one and $100 in the other).
But then he said this: “And the President used that mathematical device to illustrate the magnitude of the theft that has been happening against our country and our people.”
Most of the coverage treated this as a story about stupidity. I think that's the wrong read. My question is why RFK Jr. and Trump (or any other politician) might prefer to use “600%” over “83.33%” (the correct percentage decrease), and what that might indicate about the state of public discourse today.
This is Neil Postman’s observation in his classic, Amusing Ourselves to Death, that we’ve cultivated a society so embedded in entertainment—where every piece of content is optimized to stimulate an audience—that even how we define and present truth is determined by what gets the most clicks and views.
In other words, what we perceive as most true is biased toward the dominant medium of our day: mass media. Or more specifically, the showmanship that mass media rewards.
$600 to $100 is an 83.33% decrease. At least, that’s what mathematicians and economists (and your calculator) will tell you.
But that’s the problem. Politicians aren’t mathematicians nor economists. They’re rhetoricians. They’re showmen.
Their priority isn’t accuracy, but rhetorical effectiveness. To get the public excited about reducing a $600 price tag to $100, they need it to be big and intuitive. Look no further than RFK’s on words: “...that mathematical device to illustrate the magnitude...”
And 83.33% isn’t as exciting as 600%. Nor is it as intuitive. After all, if the amount going up is the same as going down, the percentage has got to be the same too, right? If you go up the elevator six floors, you’ll come down six floors. It’s a calculation you might not think twice about.
In this business, being intuitive is paramount. In our society of entertainment-above-all-else, politicians would rather be sensational than accurate or reliable.
This reality is exemplified further in our politicians’ blatant disregard for contradictions. I’ll let Postman paint the picture here:
In chapter 7 of his book, he pulls up a New York Times article from 1983:
Reagan Misstatements Getting Less Attention
President Reagan’s aides used to become visibly alarmed at suggestions that he had given mangled and perhaps misleading accounts of his policies or of current events in general. That doesn’t seem to happen much anymore. Indeed, the President continues to make debatable assertions of fact but news accounts do not deal with them as extensively as they once did. In the view of White House officials, the declining news coverage mirrors a decline in interest by the general public.
(If you swap out the names and modernize the writing style, you might mistake that article to be have been written yesterday. I guess when Trump promised to bring back the Reagan era, he meant it in more dimensions than one.)
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Postman observes: “Many of the President’s ‘misstatements’ fall in the category of contradictions—mutually exclusive assertions that cannot possibly be both, in the same context, be true. ‘In the same context’ is the key phrase here, for it is context that defines contradiction.”
We need sustained context, continuity, rationality, to discern contradictions. Without that, we lose the ability to identify truth and enforce consequences for deception.
Walter Lippmann wrote in 1920:
“There can be no liberty for a community which lacks the means by which to detect lies.”
And what is more context-stripping than the world created by media platforms on which pieces of disparate content are fed to you every few seconds?
For Postman in 1985, it was television where a solemn news story about the potential for nuclear war is abruptly followed up by a lighthearted commercial for diapers. For us in 2026, it’s social media where a clip of brutality from the Middle East is quickly replaced by a cat video.
This phenomenon of mass media stripped of sustained context produced a society that prioritizes intuitive, attention-farming content over accuracy and nuance. It also reduced our memory.
We’re suffering from a societal dementia that traps us in repeating the same mistakes and prevents us from holding people accountable. The constant slew of information and the vast availability of content keep us occupied so we wouldn’t have the space and time to remember things that were said and done just weeks ago.
It is the symptom of such a society that is Reagan’s ability to give “mangled and perhaps misleading accounts of his policies or of current events” without much public consequence. It is also the symptom that is RFK Jr.’s and Trump’s ability to do the same.
In his Senate hearing, RFK stated, “President Trump has a different way of calculating percentages. There's two ways of calculating percentages.” And he’s right. The first way of calculating is mathematical. The second way is rhetorical.
As far as they’re concerned, it doesn’t mater if their version of the math works on the calculator—it works in the gut, and that's the only calculator that matters to them in a world where decisions are made and ideologies are formed from soundbites.
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