Alright, let’s have a proper squiz at the latest from the Donald Trump show. When he pledged to slash drug prices by “fifteen hundred percent,” it was more than just a throwaway gaffe. It was a perfect, absurd monument to the entire project of his presidency. This isn’t a simple maths error—it’s a profound illiteracy, and it matters because a room full of aides who know a 100% reduction means free are forced to pretend it isn’t. The consequences of this cultivated ignorance now threaten the entire world, a phenomenon aided by a complicit media empire and turbocharged by a global economy that profits from our shortening attention spans.

Let’s be clear on the maths: a 100% reduction means the item is free. You can’t get freer than free. A 1500% reduction would imply the government starts paying you fourteen times the original price to take your Ventolin inhaler. It’s not policy; it’s a nonsense. Yet it was uttered with conviction.

This is where the lazy “Aussie larrikin” comparison completely falls over. Our larrikins might take the piss out of authority; they don’t become the authority and then systematically dismantle the very concept of fact. What Trump has unleashed is a virulent hatred for expertise itself, and he’s been aided and abetted every step of the way by an unlikely kingmaker from our own shores: the Dirty Digger himself, Rupert Murdoch.

The collusion begins with the very foundation of his myth. Trump’s academic record is a black hole. He didn’t get into the prestigious Wharton School out of high school; he transferred, a move widely reported to be the result of his father’s influence and donations. For a “stable genius” and “Wharton man,” the academic record is curiously barren. There are no papers, no thesis, no anecdotes of a brilliant mind.

In fact, the evidence points to fraud. Author Michael Wolff reported that Trump paid a smarter peer, Joe Shapiro, to take his SATs. His niece, the clinical psychologist Mary Trump, has written that the family believed he paid others to take his exams at Wharton. His own sister, the late former federal judge Maryanne Trump Barry, reportedly told Mary Trump that “he is a clown.” This is not a man who stumbled; he is a man who allegedly cheated, and whose entire brand is built on the aggressive promotion of that bluff.

Crucially, any attempt to clarify this opaque history is met with a stony, institutional silence from the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School. Despite numerous requests from journalists over the years, Wharton has consistently refused to comment on Trump’s academic performance, his transfer, or the allegations surrounding his attendance. This silence is deafening. It protects the brand of the institution at the cost of public accountability, allowing the myth of the brilliant “Wharton man” to persist unchallenged by fact.

This is where Murdoch’s Fox News and the tabloid ecosystem come in. They didn’t just report on this myth; they manufactured it daily. The breathtaking hypocrisy is that while Murdoch’s inner circle reportedly held Trump in utter contempt—biographer Michael Wolff quoted Murdoch himself calling Trump a “fucking idiot”—his outlets ceaselessly amplified the very populism, racism, and anti-intellectualism that made Trump a viable political force. Murdoch saw the useful idiot and exploited him perfectly, understanding that Trump’s buffoonery was ratings gold and a potent weapon for their political ends. The scurrilous press, of which Fox is a dab hand, provided the megaphone for the 1500% lies, presenting them not as errors but as bold, anti-elite truth-telling.

This disdain for fact, now mainstreamed by media barons, has dire global consequences. The Trumpian mantra of “drill, baby, drill” is not just energy policy; it is a wilful abdication of responsibility for the harm done by fossil fuels in a world where global warming is already causing catastrophic weather events. It is a promise to pour petrol on a fire that is already burning down the house—a house we all live in.

Perhaps the most horrifying symbol of this crusade against knowledge is his promotion of Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a dangerous charlatan and anti-vaxxer, to be a leader in US health. Kennedy’s conspiracy theories are not just fringe nonsense; they are lethal misinformation that undermines public health. To put “Road-Kill Kennedy” in charge of the nation’s well-being is the ultimate act of sabotage against governance by fact.

This dissemination of ignorance is made terrifyingly easy by the rise of a global attention economy, a concept detailed by thinkers like Tim Wu in The Attention Merchants. Our attention has been monetised; our news feeds are engineered for engagement, not enlightenment. In this economy, a sensationalised lie travels faster than a tedious, fact-checked truth. A 1500% claim is perfect click-bait; the complex, boring reality of drug pricing is not. Authoritative analysis is displaced by algorithms that reward outrage, creating a world where a lucrative falsehood will always outperform an inconvenient fact.

The suggestion of sending him back to grade school is a quaint one, even if the man is, on paper, a graduate of the Wharton School of Business. The real scandal is how he got there and what he did—or didn’t—do to stay.

The real problem is the legions of people who know better and applaud anyway. From the stony silence of ivory towers to the cynical calculations of media boardrooms, they cultivate a landscape where ignorance is not just excused but celebrated, and that is a failing not of one man, but of an entire system’s moral and intellectual courage.

Yet, for all this, there is hope. It lies in the stubborn, unglamorous work of holding power to account and speaking truth, however loudly it is drowned out by the noise. Although social media is a two-edged sword, it provides a forum for the citizen-journalist and the sharing of objective truth and independent opinion. The task ahead—rebuilding a common reality based on evidence, reason, and intellectual honesty—is far harder than it has ever been. But as the theologian Walter Wink wrote, and as our own Philip Adams was so fond of quoting, “The future is impossible. We must take the next step.” We must speak truth to power; we must hold the powerful to account. Especially now.