Attorney General Pam Bondi shared and then deleted a graph showing a steep drop in drug overdose deaths after she was busted trying to give the Trump administration credit for progress made under Joe Biden.
The graph, which tracked overdose deaths from October 2015 to October 2024, showed that deaths surged nationwide beginning in 2015 with the advent of fentanyl, according to a June 2025 article from JAMA, the Journal of the American Medical Association.
The overdose rate spiked just before the start of the coronavirus pandemic, during President Donald Trump’s first term, before largely plateauing in 2022 and 2023. From October 2023 to October 2024, when Biden was in office, the rate of overdose deaths began to fall sharply again.
The deceleration that Biden oversaw was nearly twice the rate of the surge that happened between 2019 and 2021, the study’s authors noted.
Bondi nevertheless used graph as “evidence” that the Trump administration is effectively battling the nation’s drug epidemic.
“President Trump closed the border. DOJ agents have seized hundreds of millions of potentially lethal fentanyl doses. We are aggressively prosecuting drug traffickers and cartel leaders. These are the results,” she added. “Elections have consequences. Electing President Trump and enforcing the law is saving American lives.”
Social media users, however, quickly pointed out that the graph’s title made it clear that it was referring to the period before Trump took office.
Democratic Rep. Ted Lieu of California responded to Bondi’s post thanking her for “unintentionally giving massive credit to Joe Biden.”
The attorney general then deleted her post, but not before several users took screenshots of the original.
“Lol, the truth hurts,” Lieu wrote alongside a screenshot. “@AGPamBondi was glazing Trump again with another lying sycophantic tweet, but the chart she attached stopped in Oct 2024, thus showing the great work done by Joe Biden.”
The Daily Beast has reached out to the Department of Justice for comment.
Healthcare professionals worry that the gains made at the end of Biden’s term—which amount to a 27 percent reduction in overdose deaths—are at risk because of Trump’s signature spending bill, which cut $1 billion from the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Agency, NPR reported in June.
Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has laid off more than a third of the SAMHA staff and is dissolving the agency, the Department of Health and Human Services announced in March.
At the same time, Trump has used the drug epidemic as an excuse to order a series of deadly attacks on small boats in the Caribbean Sea and the Pacific Ocean, killing 97 people as of Tuesday, and to strike infrastructure in Venezuela.
The president has also claimed that some of his sweeping tariffs on products from dozens of U.S. trade partners are in response to the fentanyl crisis.
But the president’s tough-on-narco-terrorists posturing has been undermined by his willingness to pardon nearly 100 people convicted of drug-related crimes.
During his first term, he granted pardons or commutations to almost 90 people for drug-related crimes.
Since taking office in January, he has freed 10 more, including pardoning former Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernández, who trafficked hundreds of tons of cocaine into the U.S., and Silk Road founder Ross Ulbricht, whose black-market site on the dark web generated hundreds of millions of dollars in sales of illegal goods and services, including drugs.
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