During the Republican primaries, Donald Trump’s campaign released “Agenda 47,” a video series outlining his plans should he return to the White House. “Too often, our public health establishment is too close to Big Pharma,” Trump said in a video from June 2023. Another installment from the same month — one that is no longer online — focused on “taking on Big Pharma” by lowering prescription drug prices.
Trump has a long track record of talking tough in public and turning soft in private. But his alliance with Robert F. Kennedy Jr. in the campaign’s closing months cracked the door to the possibility that Trump meant what he said. His choice of Kennedy for secretary of health and human services opened the door further, given that Kennedy is as stridently opposed to the pharmaceutical industry as he is thoroughly unqualified for a Cabinet position. But with more than a month still to go until Trump’s inauguration, Kennedy is already falling in line with Trump’s corrupt faux populism.
Only the pharmaceutical companies get seats at Trump’s table. Consumer advocates are nowhere to be seen.
“President-elect Trump hosted the chief executives of Pfizer, Eli Lilly and PhRMA Wednesday night at Mar-a-Lago,” Axios reported Thursday, “where they discussed how the public and private sectors can collaborate on finding cures for cancer, among other topics. ... The meeting at Mar-a-Lago included a pre-dinner reception and lasted nearly three hours.” Also in attendance were Kennedy, incoming White House chief of staff Susie Wiles and Mehmet Oz, Trump’s choice to run the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services.
Trump shared more details about the meeting Sunday in his interview with NBC News’ Kristen Welker:
At Mar-a-Lago, I called the drug companies, the top drug companies, and I called RFK Jr. and Dr. Oz and some of his people, and I said, “Let’s all get together and let’s figure out where we’re going, because we’re going to do a lot of things.”…And we talked about pricing. And we talked about vaccines, you know, in terms of what happens. We talked about pesticides. We talked about everything.
Notice, first of all, that only the pharmaceutical companies get seats at Trump’s table. Consumer advocates are nowhere to be seen. Trump observed — correctly! — in the interview that drug prices in the U.S. are “much higher than the prices for the same medicine” abroad. Yet in Trump and Kennedy’s world, the people who pay those high prices are shut out.
As for how the dinner conversation went, past Mar-a-Lago meetings between Trump and business interests are instructive. In March, Trump reversed his position on whether TikTok’s Chinese parent company should be forced to sell the app after meeting at the club with conservative donor Jeff Yass, whose personal stake in TikTok is worth billions. The following month, at a dinner convened by billionaire Harold Hamm, Trump told oil industry executives and lobbyists that they should donate $1 billion to his campaign so he could do their bidding in office.
No wonder lobbyists have descended on Mar-a-Lago since Trump’s victory: Not only is he the president, but what big business wants, big business gets. Companies that face Trump's ire — like the pharmacy benefit managers and other health-care middlemen whom he criticized in his “Meet the Press” interview — can, like Tiktok, change his mind with the right amount of money. The open corruption of Trump’s first term was bad enough, but as my colleague Zeeshan Aleem wrote last month, “It’s possible Trump’s second term will make his first look like a paragon of ethical governance by comparison.”
Kennedy’s compliance is entirely unsurprising, and not just because, as NBC News reported Friday, the Trump campaign paid $100,000 to a law firm that employs Kennedy after he endorsed Trump. Like the president-elect, Kennedy has a history of mismatched words and actions, whether it’s selling fluoridated water that he now wants to ban or requiring Covid vaccinations at his holiday party even as he denounced them to the public.
The drug companies are going to be working with RFK Jr.”
Donald Trump
Well-intentioned Democrats who think a Secretary Kennedy would really take on Big Pharma, Big Food and other business lobbies arrayed will be sorely disappointed. “He’s not going reinvent the wheel,” Trump said of Kennedy. “The drug companies are going to be working with RFK Jr.” But that’s exactly the problem with the entire incoming administration, from Trump on down. Whatever Americans thought they were voting for in the 2024 election, it was not government by, of and for lobbyists and billionaires.
Trump himself seems aware of this vulnerability; in recent years he has backed off the “drain the swamp” rhetoric of his first two presidential runs. A Washington Post analysis conducted shortly before the election “found that Trump has used the metaphor just 59 times on Truth Social, his social media site, in the past two years — fewer times than he wrote about it on Twitter in October 2016 alone.” And he has changed the phrase into “an expression of grievance against government prosecutors.”
But to capitalize on this disparity, Democrats must become a truly working-class opposition, rejecting the influence of industry lobbyists and wealthy donors. Whether they can do that is another story.
