For the umpteenth time in recent weeks, Donald Trump on Tuesday promised Americans that he would slash prescription drug prices by 1,500 percent. Obviously, anybody who passed 8th grade math knows that this is arithmetically impossible… unless the president can convince pharmaceutical companies to not only give away their products for free but also pay people handsomely for taking them.

Not that any of our readers need a math lesson, but let’s quickly review how this works.

Obviously, it is possible to increase the price of a good or service by more than 100 percent.

For example, once his supporters started footing the bill, Trump bumped up the rent of his campaign headquarters by more than 400 percent in 2016, and he is charging Secret Service agents (or, more precisely, US taxpayers) up to 800 percent more than other guests to stay at his properties.

However, it is impossible to decrease the cost of something by more than 100 percent.

Let’s use Jardiance, a popular drug for heart patients and diabetics, as an example, and assume that its list price is about $500 per month (thanks to prices negotiated under the Biden administration, it’s less expensive for Medicare enrollees, but it’s not a cheap drug).

A 10 percent reduction in its price would knock its cost down to $450. Cutting the cost by half would make it $250, and a 100 percent drop would mean that Jardiance is free.

Nothing comes after that.

In other words, anybody who promises cost savings of 1,500 percent for anything is either an idiot or believes that their audience consists of idiots.

In this case, it might be both.

But that’s not the real issue here.

While Trump, a self-proclaimed genius who “earned” an economics degree somehow (and if you want to investigate American universities, it might be worth looking into how that happened), has been roundly ridiculed for his inability to comprehend basic math, there is a more important underlying problem his nonsensical and oft-repeated claim reveals.

Why isn’t anybody telling him that he sounds like an idiot?

For example, when GIFs and memes became a thing, lots of people initially mispronounced these new words, so friends or coworkers would take them aside and tell them how to say them correctly.

There are three reasons we can think of why that isn’t happening here.

As a malignant narcissist, Trump doesn’t really have friends, just people who want something from him (or walk up to him with tears in their eyes to tell him that he is doing a great job).

To be fair, he did have that one pal, but the two of them had a falling out after his buddy “stole” a young woman from him. And, in any case, that guy died in prison during Trump’s first term.

So, the first possibility is that he doesn’t have any friends who could correct him.

The second is that people are telling him that it is mathematically impossible to lower drug prices by more than 100 percent, and the president keeps repeating that claim anyways because he either believes that he knows better or he just doesn’t care.

And the third option is that those in Trump’s orbit are too afraid to tell him that he sounds like a doofus because they know he is mentally ill and doesn’t like to be corrected.

All of these things are much more disconcerting than him being a buffoon.

We don’t necessarily need a president who understands basic math (although that would be nice), but we do need one who can form human connections with people, and one who can accept criticism and admit mistakes.

Instead, we are settled with Trump, who is at least 10,000 percent worse than any of his predecessors… if that were a thing.