Trump Swiftly Factchecked After Making Bonkers Claim About How Many Americans Died From Drugs Last Year

President Donald Trump was criticized after attempting to justify the bombing of a suspected Venezuelan drug boat by asserting that 300 million people died from drugs last year.

Speaking to reporters on Sunday, Trump was asked about the order he gave earlier this month to destroy a boat he suspected of transporting drugs off the coast of Venezuela, rather than simply intercepting it. All 11 people on board the boat were killed.

When a reporter noted that Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro called the bombing "illegal," Trump had this to say:

“What’s illegal are the drugs that were on the boat, and the drugs that are being sent into our country, and the fact that 300 million people died last year from drugs, that’s what’s illegal."

You can hear what he said in the video below.

The number Trump cited is a statistical impossibility.

For context, the entire population of the U.S. is 340 million—so Trump is saying that roughly 88% of all the people in the country have died from drug overdoses, which is utterly bonkers.

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), roughly 75,000 people died from drug overdoses in the past year—a decrease from 2023, when the toll exceeded 110,000.

Worldwide, drug use causes about 600,000 deaths annually, according to the World Health Organization (WHO)—just 0.2% of the total Trump claimed.

Trump was mocked profusely.

While U.S. defense officials have thus far failed to clarify the legal authority under which this extrajudicial killing was carried out, on Monday, Trump announced they had destroyed yet another boat off the coast of Venezuela, this one carrying three people suspected of trafficking drugs.

While the U.S. is not a signatory to the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, military legal advisers have said Washington generally seeks to act in line with its provisions. Under the convention, states are barred from interfering with vessels in international waters, except under limited circumstances such as “hot pursuit” of a ship fleeing a country’s territorial waters.

Maduro has accused the Trump administration of “aggression of a military character” in launching the strike, which marked a major escalation in Trump's pledge to halt drug traffickers.