It's not much of anything - Trump said he would get pharma prices down 500 percent or such.

He said it more than once on more than one occasion though. Which, as with all these things, means either:

- this is his wonky understanding (and he is pretty famously innumerate)

- he's saying it as a power game despite the pushback because people around him feel they have to smile, agree and retcon stuff to make it believable

Or indeed both.

I do kinda expect he saw the number on a paper and has latched onto it, personally. I doubt he can interpret tables or charts.

The most charitable explanation is that -- because as a malignant narcissist his grasp of past, present and future is really kind of broken -- he's talking about reversing hypothetical gains, and because the numbers sound big he doesn't care that it doesn't make any sense to the listener, and his team will twist themselves into pretzels to make it true anyway.

(I haven't yet heard them make the claim that he means reversing gains, but I would expect them to. Heck if it was my job to make his Truth Social messages make sense, that is what I would say.)

But honestly his grasp of fractions and percentages has long been known to be worse than early era ChatGPT.

The most worrying aspect of the Trump era for the markets should be that he treats numbers as entirely flexible according to his mood, when the market needs them to at least be consistent.

But then they knew this before he was elected the first time; he is famous for admitting he assesses the value of future business at any time based in part on how he feels about it (which is reminiscent of the way Musk assesses future valuations, future delivery dates for full-self-driving, future sales of robots etc.)

So it's not a political thing at all. He hasn't always been a Republican but he has always been like this with numbers, and anyone who has ever subjected his words to any kind of scrutiny should know it.