Trump promises to lower pharmaceutical prices — but without having the authority to do so in a lasting way — plus a depressing look at the rest of his recent record

13 May 2025

Trump's lower drug prices endeavor is likely to go . . .

. . . about as well as achieving peace in Ukraine, implementing 'fairer' trade with China, nuclear containment talks with Iran, and bombing the heck out of the Houthis have.

Trump seems to settle on creating bubbling chaos, so as to mask the societally negative impacts of his serial incompetence:

President Donald Trump said he will sign an executive order that institutes a "most favored nation" policy for drug pricing, reviving a plan from his first term that he said will reduce prescription drug and pharmaceutical prices "almost immediately, by 30% to 80%."

The order, which Trump plans to sign at 9 a.m. ET on May 12, is expected to direct the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services to adopt the policy, which would set prescription drug prices to match those of comparable countries.

Full details of the order, which drew immediate resistance from the pharmaceutical industry, were unclear, including which insurance programs and drugs would fall under the initiative. During his first term, Trump in 2020 pushed a "most favored nation" rule that would have applied to Medicare payments but was later rescinded by the Biden administration.

Notice a couple of things about this lazily thought out plan

Let's (overly generously) assume that this most favored nation HHS-led thing is actually implemented over Big Pharma's objections.

What, afterward, is going to force those Drug Corporatists to keep manufacturing pharmaceuticals for the US market?

Or prevent them from manipulating foreign markets, so as to inflate the costs there, against which US prices are compared under the favored nation idea?

Nada.

If Trump really wants to tackle pharmaceutical costs, he will have to do so via Congressional legislation and a lawful means with which to impose whatever Congress passes upon Big Pharma.

Guess how far that's going to get — what with Big Pharma's total control of our cabal of rabidly avaricious Congressional grifters.

For perspective

Let's look at the rest of Trump's recent record.

First, there was going to be peace in Ukraine.

All Orange Man Bad had to do to achieve that was eliminate American aid to Ukraine.

Terminating this assistance was fully under the Trump's commander in chief power. Yet, he did nothing.

Instead, The Donald has kept feeding Ukraine the arms, money, direct military assistance and the intelligence that it needs to keep the war going.

Including letting the Ukro-Nazis shoot a HIMARS missile — and commit a reported thousands of ceasefire violations — during the Federation's Victory Day weekend.

On top of all that — Mr. I'm Badder than You repeatedly has threatened Russia with sanctions and consequences of unnamed types.

This weekend, he overtly joined Europe's (literally mentally ill leaders) in threatening Russia with more NATO-initiated havoc.

And that flip-flop arrived, after Trump contradictorily spent weeks trying to put a rift between himself and the EU's globalist nutcases.

Consequently, all this constantly Pirouetting Ditherer has accomplished, is irretrievably trashing any chance of normalizing relations with the Russian Federation. An outcome that is exactly the opposite of the one Trump claimed to want, during the United States's 2024 presidential election.

Second, consider how the honor-bound Houthis handed Mr. Mouth an even more visibly bloody nose.

Yemen, you may recall, is where President Trump was going to bomb those (allegedly primitive tribes people) back to the Stone Age.

Instead, the Houthis (Ansar Allah) absorbed all the United States' blows and kept shooting back. That being so as a matter of cultural honor and anti-Zionist, anti-genocidal principle.

So, in sum, after losing millions and millions of futilely aimed dollars — in the form of US armaments, military maneuvers, and two accidentally lost fighter aircraft — Trump falsely declared victory and retreated with his tail tucked firmly between his facts-bitten legs.

Similarly third — with regard to China — Trump had to retreat on his 145 percent tariffs. Evidently due to clamor from US business interests. Yet, he unpersuasively claims that China's willingness to go back to what essentially existed before, is a victory for him.

How does that work?

Trump starts a trade war with China, predictably loses — given the imbalance of manufacturing might and national indebtedness — and conveniently casts his laughably self-destructive effort as a victory?

The moral? — President Trump is a scatterbrained showboater

He causes trouble, pretty much wherever he goes. Evidently doing so with the primary intent of attracting attention to his narcissistically bloviating self.

Objectively speaking, not much good has come out of this administration. Other than its decisions to (a) put Robert F. Kennedy Jr in charge of Health and Human Services and (b) to firm up the southern US border against excessive immigration. (But doing the latter in an unnecessarily odious style.)

How those two arguable positives are going to significantly offset the United States' plummeting international reputation — as well as its faltering economy — beats me.

With regard to the Trump administration's overall ignorance and incompetence, former British diplomat Alastair Crooke summed President Trump's string of international failures in the following essay:

Alastair Crooke, Why Doesn’t the ‘Deal-Maker’ Close the Deal?, Unz Review (05 May 2025)

Crooke's (mostly implied) thesis is that The Donald and his advisors are ignorant of history, have no interest in strategic realities and — most critically — lack even a "modicum of reciprocity".

In short, our the United States' characteristically warmongering, self-destructive idiocy continues under Trump.

So much for the Orange Savior.

I suspect that Trump's ability to accomplish anything substantial, after these in-progress disasters, will end.

He will become a lame duck. Castrated by his lack of diligently committed seriousness.

Trump's destructive commotion, however, will continue. Creating chaos is his most basic nature.

Breaking things appears to give him a sense of power. Destruction take a lot less effort and skill, than energetically building something that lasts.

Nihilists — ironically, exactly like the Biden Gang that Trump tried to replace — can rejoice.

PeteFree.com

Trump promises to lower pharmaceutical prices — but without having the authority to do so in a lasting way — plus a depressing look at the rest of his recent record