Fact check: Trump’s absurd claim that he saved 100,000 lives by attacking alleged Venezuelan drug boats

By Daniel Dale, CNN

(CNN) — President Donald Trump has been using fictional figures to justify his controversial military strikes on alleged drug-trafficking boats in the Caribbean near Venezuela.

“Every boat kills about 25,000 people,” Trump said in a speech last week. “Every one of those boats is responsible for the death of 25,000 American people, and the destruction of families,” he said in a speech Sunday. “Probably saved at least 100,000 lives, American lives – Canadian lives – by taking out all those boats coming in,” he said while sitting with Canada’s prime minister at the White House on Tuesday.

These numbers do not make any sense.

The total number of US overdose deaths from all drugs in 2024 was about 82,000, according to provisional federal data. (Even adding in reported Canadian opioid and stimulant deaths doesn’t bring the total to 100,000.) Trump is essentially claiming, in other words, that his decision to attack a small number of boats in the Caribbean – there have been at least four US strikes since the beginning of September – prevented more than a full year’s worth of deaths.

The president’s figures “are absurd,” said Carl Latkin, a professor at the Johns Hopkins University school of public health with a joint appointment at its medical school.

“He’s claiming that he’s solved the overdose mortality crisis” with four boat strikes, and “that does not have any semblance of reality,” Latkin said in an email. “The overdose crisis continues to destroy the lives of many hard-working American families.”

There are other issues with Trump’s claims. The White House and Defense Department have not presented proof that the boats were carrying either drugs in general or the “fentanyl, mostly” Trump claimed last week they were carrying, nor that the people on the boats were planning to try to get such drugs into the US. The Caribbean is not known to be a significant fentanyl-smuggling route, and Venezuela is not considered a significant source of the illicit fentanyl trafficked into the US. That fentanyl is primarily manufactured in Mexico and smuggled across the US border in vehicles – generally by US citizens.

But even if the boats Trump ordered destroyed did indeed contain fentanyl or other drugs, and even if the people aboard were trying to get those drugs to Americans, there is no basis for the claim that each such boat kills anywhere close to 25,000 people.

Supposed potential deaths don’t equal actual deaths

Trump wrote on social media last week that one of the boats the US attacked was “loaded with enough drugs to kill 25 TO 50 THOUSAND PEOPLE.”

Though Trump’s “50 thousand” figure is even more clearly inaccurate than the “25 thousand” figure he has been saying at public events, his “enough drugs to kill” language is notably softer than his spoken claims that each Venezuelan drug boat actually kills tens of thousands of people. It’s reminiscent of previous claims from various political and law enforcement officials that police busts or border seizures discovered enough fentanyl to kill millions of Americans.

But public health experts warn that even those claims are overblown.

Officials’ calculations about millions of potential deaths are generally based on the amount of fentanyl that would likely be lethal to someone who had no acquired tolerance for the drug. But “the people buying and using fentanyl mostly have a tolerance” because “most people who use illicitly manufactured fentanyl do so on purpose, repeatedly,” said Chelsea Shover, an epidemiologist who is associate professor-in-residence at the University of California, Los Angeles medical school. So while some Americans do die from accidentally consuming fentanyl while trying to use other substances, Shover said in an email, the quantity of fentanyl required for most users to fatally overdose is “much higher” than the supposed lethal dose officials tend to use in their “enough to kill” math.

Regardless, the president’s public remarks are going much further than the familiar “enough to kill” claims. His assertions that any Venezuelan drug boat is actually responsible for killing 25,000 Americans have no grounding in fact.

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