Donald Trump’s controversial picks for his upcoming Cabinet have rattled right past the American public and on to damaging Wall Street.

In the wake of Trump’s decision to tap vaccine foe Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to run the Department of Health and Human Services, stocks linked to some of the biggest pharmaceutical companies—including Moderna, Pfizer, and Novavax—plummeted to some of their lowest points of the year.

Novavax and BioNTech dropped by more than 7 percent, with “almost all of the losses coming after news broke of the selection,” reported Forbes. Moderna saw shares close at $39.77, knocking the stock to its lowest point this year. Pfizer, meanwhile, escaped the day with relatively minor losses, with stocks dropping by 2.6 percent to $26.02.

The pharmaceutical industry hedged its bets in the last election cycle, donating considerable sums of money to both parties. But the historically conservative-leaning sector did, ultimately, give more to Republican candidates—with its affiliated PACs handing approximately $1.7 million more to Republicans across the 2024 election, amounting to $8.3 million in total to the conservative party, according to data collected by OpenSecrets.

But that’s not the only impact that Trump’s policies are having on the stock market. Now that the initial rush surrounding Trump’s pro–big business agenda is quieting down, investors are waking up to the staggering costs of some of his plans. For the second day in a row, the S&P 500 dropped, with tech stocks at the forefront of the decline, according to Bloomberg.

“[Trump’s plans] will come at the expense of potentially larger budget deficits, potentially larger debt and there is also the inflation dimension,” Charles-Henry Monchau, chief investment officer at Banque Syz & Co, told the business publication. “There’s been a realization that there is a price to pay for this.”

Trump has floated several tariff ideas—including one impossibly high hike on imported goods of between 200 and 2,000 percent—that experts believe would drastically spike inflation. Businesses across the country have balked at his numbers, arguing that it will be Americans, not foreign countries, who pay the price. Readying themselves for a potential second Trump administration, companies whose business models rely on foreign suppliers, from the auto industry to some of the nation’s most popular clothing lines, are planning to introduce price hikes on their products.

Trump has also proposed a more modest 20–60 plan, in which a potential second Trump administration would impose a 20 percent worldwide tariff alongside a 60 percent tariff on Chinese goods. But even that plan would prove devastating for the economy, according to an analysis by the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center, which found that it would lower household incomes by an average of $3,000 in 2025.

Donald Trump has nominated his attorney D. John Sauer, whom you may remember as the lawyer who argued that the president should be able to kill his political rivals with impunity, to be the country’s next solicitor general.

Earlier this year, Sauer helped Trump win his presidential immunity case before the Supreme Court, which undermined other federal legal battles against Trump, like the time he tried to overturn the government after losing the 2020 election. Now Sauer will oversee all federal lawsuits.

In a statement Thursday, Trump lauded Sauer as the “lead counsel representing me in the Supreme Court in Trump v. United States, winning a Historic Victory on Presidential Immunity, which was key to defeating the unConstitutional campaign of Lawfare against me and the entire MAGA movement.”

While representing Trump, Sauer argued that if the president ordered an assassination on his political enemies, he could not be indicted unless he had first been impeached.

When Justice Sonia Sotomayor drilled him about immunity in the case of assassinating political rivals, he replied, “It would depend on the hypothetical but we can see that would well be an official act.” When she asked if the same rule existed if the president executed people for “personal gain,” Sauer said that immunity still stood.

Ultimately, the court decided that the president had immunity for official acts.

Unlike many of Trump’s other picks, Sauer does have some experience qualifying him for the position. Sauer previously served as the solicitor general of Missouri from 2016 to 2023, under pro-Trump Senators Josh Hawley and Eric Schmitt, both election deniers.

After the 2020 general election, Sauer filed a brief asking the Supreme Court to overturn the results of the presidential election in several swing states over alleged mail-in voting fraud.

Sauer left the Missouri attorney general’s office in 2023 to serve as special assistant attorney general for the Louisiana Department of Justice, where he assisted them in launching a lawsuit against members of the Biden administration, aiming to prevent government officials from contacting social media platforms over First Amendment issues.

Donald Trump’s nominee for secretary of health and human services, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., is drawing opposition from former Vice President Mike Pence over Kennedy’s remarks on abortion.

In a statement, Pence said Kennedy “would be the most pro-abortion Republican appointed secretary of HHS in modern history.”

“On behalf of tens of millions of pro-life Americans, I respectfully urge Senate Republicans to reject this nomination and give the American people a leader who will respect the sanctity of life as secretary of Health and Human Services,” Pence’s statement said.

Trump’s choice of Kennedy has drawn alarm from health care professionals, who see his history of opposing vaccination as a threat to public health. Kennedy has also pledged to root out “corruption” in U.S. health agencies such as the Food and Drug Administration and National Institutes of Health, and has floated the idea of removing fluoride from the nation’s public water........

© New Republic