Pam Bondi Thinks Trump Saved Your Life

“At the rate Trump is saving lives, death will cease to exist by August,” quipped the Daily Show’s Michael Kosta.

Kosta was mocking Attorney General Pam Bondi, who—in a cabinet meeting on April 30—made the stunning claim that in President Trump’s first 100 days, the Department of Justice’s seizure of 22 million fentanyl pills—at the president’s direction—has saved more than 258 million lives.

You read that correctly. Trump has saved 258 million lives in a country of not even 350 million people—a country that had seen fewer than 75,000 deaths from fentanyl in all of the previous year. According to Bondi, were it not for President Trump in his first 100 days in office, approximately 75 percent of the American population would have died from a fentanyl overdose.

“Kids are dying every day because they’re taking this junk, laced with something else. They don’t know what they’re taking,” Bondi said in the meeting. “They think they’re buying a Tylenol or an Adderall or a Xanax, and it’s laced with fentanyl, dropping dead. No longer, because of you, what you’ve done.”

In true Trumpian fashion, Bondi’s numbers have been growing. The day before the cabinet meeting, Bondi visited a forensic laboratory at the Drug Enforcement Administration’s (DEA’s) headquarters for a “fentanyl demonstration.” After her visit, Bondi posted on X that the Justice Department’s seizures of fentanyl-laced pills had saved more than 119 million lives, which is still a significant, but substantially lower, number. So in a day, according to the attorney general, the lives Trump saved from fentanyl more than doubled.

And Kosta isn’t the only comedian to poke fun at Bondi’s comments. Indeed, the internet has made memes out of the vice president’s seemingly doubtful reaction to the numbers.

But this is the attorney general of the United States, and this is a factual claim about law enforcement’s impact made on behalf of the U.S. government. It’s important to take such claims seriously and run them down.

So I reached out to the Justice Department with a request to justify the attorney general’s comments based on quantitative data. Just hours later, Natalie Baldassarre, senior media affairs manager in the Justice Department’s Office of Public Affairs, responded with the following equation:

The 119 million lives saved is from fentanyl seized by the DEA. The 258 million is from fentanyl seized by the DEA AND FBI. Breakdown of how this was calculated below.
1 kg of fentanyl* .1518 (current purity level) * 1000 (to convert to grams) / by .002 (amount needed for a deadly dose) = lethal dose of fentanyl
So, 3,400 Kg of fentanyl seized in Trump’s first 100 days
3400*.1518
*1000
/.002
=258,060,000 deadly doses

The math here mirrors exactly the justification department spokespeople have sent other outlets asking for clarification.

But a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, as Ralph Waldo Emerson once wrote. And while the Justice Department’s explanations of Bondi’s words may be consistent, it is also very foolish.

Even assuming that there were 258 million lethal doses seized, saving 258 million lives requires that 258 million Americans would have taken those doses. If you don’t have the impression that three-quarters of your acquaintances are taking the drug, that’s because they’re not. “One hundred nineteen million Americans do not even use fentanyl, and to risk an overdose requires intentional ingestion of fentanyl (or another illicit drug contaminated with fentanyl),” said one expert.

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, approximately 50,000 Americans died from a fentanyl overdose between December 2023 and November 2024. That’s a tragic number, but the decimal point would have to move in it three times, and then you’d have to multiply the resulting number by five, before it would be in the ballpark of what Bondi asserted. 

There are more problems with Bondi’s claims. She asserted that the 3,400 kilograms (kg) of fentanyl seized during Trump’s first 100 days came in the form of approximately 22 million pills. So even if every man, woman, and child in America did plan to ingest the drug, how are 258 million people supposed to share only 22 million pills? That’s almost 12 people per pill—each one of them dying.

The math provided by the Justice Department incorporates a “purity level” of .1518. According to the Center for Forensic Science Research and Education, a purity level in a drug is defined as “the amount or quantity of a specific drug in a material or product.” The Justice Department’s equation assumes that the purity level is consistent across 3,400 kg of the seized fentanyl.

While an average purity level is often helpful for drug experts to determine trends in seized fentanyl powders and tablets over the years, fentanyl purity—according to the DEA—varies significantly from sample to sample. For example, the DEA’s 2021 Fentanyl Profiling Program report found that the average purity among 778 kg of seized fentanyl was 14.4 percent, but the purity level ranged from 0.1 percent to 75.6 percent depending on the sample. Therefore—even if 258 million Americans did choose to cumulatively ingest 22 million fentanyl-laced pills, the purity level among the 3,400 kg of fentanyl seized in Trump’s first 100 days wouldn’t be consistent, so each group of 12 people sharing a particular pill would almost surely be getting different amounts of the drug.

Then there’s the Justice Department’s assertion about what constitutes a “lethal dose” of fentanyl. The department’s calculation of lives saved by Trump rests on the assumption that 2 milligrams (mg) of fentanyl constitutes the “amount needed for a deadly dose.” Two milligrams of fentanyl, according to the DEA, is considered a “potentially lethal dose,” but for an adult, the lethality of a dose varies from person to person based on a number of variables—height, weight, and tolerance from previous exposure. According to one expert, “There are high-frequency users consuming multiple pills per day for multiple years before they succumb, if ever, to an overdose.”

But let’s assume for a moment that Bondi’s logic—and math—is sound, that 258,060,000 deadly doses really means that 258,060,000 American lives were saved thanks to President Trump.

Trump would then need to bow to a far more effective life-saver: his predecessor.

According to the Department of Homeland Security, the Biden administration seized approximately 64,000 pounds of fentanyl at the southern border. That’s a lot more than a paltry 3,400 kg, which translates to only 7,480 pounds. By the Trump administration’s logic, it is enough fentanyl to kill a whopping 14 billion people. Which is to say that during his four years in office, President Biden saved every man, woman, and child worldwide nearly twice over.

There is at least tentative evidence that Bondi is rolling back the extravagance of her claims. On May 7, the Justice Department announced that it had seized 3 million fentanyl pills across five states, with “a single drug bust” in New Mexico netting “a-record breaking 2.7 million fentanyl pills, the largest seizure of deadly fentanyl pills in DEA history.”

Bondi appeared on Fox News that day to report on the DEA’s efforts. This time, she didn’t say that Trump had saved the lives of 13 people per pill. She didn’t suggest that each pill could take more than one American life. She said, rather, that the lives Trump had saved as a result of this seizure could not be quantified: “Donald Trump took [the fentanyl pills] off the streets and saved countless lives."

It’s a small improvement. It would be even better if she stopped hyping drug seizures as though they were personal accomplishments of the president, saving lives far beyond the world of people whom fentanyl actually kills.