White House to Reveal “TrumpRx” Website as Drug Prices Skyrocket
The Wall Street Journal reports that the White House plans to give Americans the chance to buy drugs directly from the government, via a website dubbed “TrumpRx.” Whether the drugs will actually be cheaper or more accessible than Medicare and Medicaid is still very much up in the air.
This announcement is timely, as Trump’s 100 percent tariff on pharmaceutical products is set to hit the market this week, and will very well likely cause the prices of medicine for millions of Americans to skyrocket. This “TrumpRx” scheme seems to be an attempt to offset that.
This also comes just days after Trump declared that he would reduce drug costs by 1,000 percent, a claim as shaky as TrumpRx’s chances of providing a wide enough range of options to actually help Americans with the incoming potential price inflation that his policies have already caused. Pfizer has already pledged to lower its own prices to help Trump, according to sources who spoke with the Journal.
“President Trump is leveraging the power of the federal government to drastically cut drug prices for everyday Americans,” White House spokesman Kush Desai told the paper. “Democrats talked the talk for decades about drug prices, but only President Trump is actually walking the walk.”
Desai brings up an interesting point here. This is essentially Trump exerting state control over the pharmaceutical industry, superseding private business so that the government can sell drugs directly to the people at prices it (supposedly) determines. If a Democrat tried that, or even talked about it, they’d likely be harangued as an anti-American Communist. But it’s Trump, so he gets tough guy points from his base instead.
This week, Senator Bernie Sanders’s office released a report revealing that the prices of nearly 700 prescription drugs have increased during Trump’s second term.
“Can’t wait to hear what GOP leadership thinks of TrumpRx. For years Dems wanted Medicare to be able to negotiate drug prices,” one user wrote on X. “GOP balked and screamed socialism. Now Trump wants to sell drugs via a government-owned website.”
Trump told senior generals and admirals they will be going to “war” on U.S. soil.
In his address Tuesday before a rare gathering of hundreds of military leaders, who were summoned from around the world to Virginia, the president lamented “what they’ve done to San Francisco, Chicago, New York, Los Angeles”—cities where he’s threatened to send troops based on the baseless notion that Democratic officials have allowed crime to run rampant there.
Priming the top brass to conceive of forthcoming military operations in those cities as a “war,” Trump continued, “They’re very unsafe places, and we’re going to straighten them out one by one. And this is going to be a major part for some of the people in this room. That’s a war too. It’s a war from within.”
Trump: San Francisco and Chicago, New York, Los Angeles… We'll straighten them out one-by-one. It will be a major part for some of the people in this room. It’s a war too. It’s a war from within pic.twitter.com/xt7By0lX6v
Trump later added that he’s told Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, “We should use some of these dangerous cities as training grounds for our military—National Guard, but military. Because we’re going into Chicago very soon.”
The declaration came just after Hegseth—whose department Trump is seeking to rebrand as the “Department of War”—told the group, “War is something you do sparingly, on our own terms, and with clear aims. We fight to win. We unleash overwhelming and punishing violence on the enemy.
“We also don’t fight with stupid rules of engagement,” Hegseth added, referring to rules that govern when, how, and to what degree members of the military are permitted to use force against foreign combatants. “We untie the hands of our warfighters to intimidate, demoralize, hunt, and kill the enemies of our country.”
Nuclear is the new “n-word,” according to Donald Trump.
The president, sharp as ever, rambled at an assembly of America’s top commanders Tuesday morning about nixing “woke” ideology from the armed services and bringing “battleships” back.
He also discussed the threat of nuclear war, telling America’s military leadership that the country’s nuclear capabilities were still far ahead of its enemies’. Trump’s rant on nuclear warfare, however, came packaged with an odd detail: that the term nuclear was, to Trump, akin to the “n-word”
“You don’t have to be that good with nuclear. You could have one-twentieth what you have now and still do the damage that would be, you know, that’d be so horrendous,” he told the crowd.
Trump used the hate-speech abbreviation to emphasize how dangerous it is to “throw around” the term nuclear, but the comparison didn’t land.
“I call it the n-word,” Trump said. “There are two n-words, and you can’t use either of them.”
Trump: It was really a stupid person that works for him mentioned the word nuclear. I call it is N word. There were two N words and you can't use either of them. pic.twitter.com/sSn5doBn8v
He then attempted to assuage concern of potential fallout by recounting how he recently directed a nuclear submarine to counter Russian threats.
“We were a little bit threatened by Russia recently, and I sent a submarine, nuclear submarine, the most lethal weapon ever made,” Trump said. “Number one, you can’t detect it. There’s no way. We’re 25 years ahead of Russia and China in submarines.”
Trump further claimed that America’s arsenal was vast enough to make it the last man standing in any type of nuclear conflict. Exactly how America’s citizens would fare during such an event, however, was unclear.
“Frankly, if it does get to use, we have more than anybody else,” Trump said. “We have better, we have newer, but it’s something we don’t ever want to even have to think about.”
Nuclear war was at the epicenter of public concern during America’s Cold War face-off with the USSR. Around the height of the conflict in 1983, ABC aired a made-for-TV movie titled The Day After that intended to publicize the potential horrors of nuclear fallout. The fictitious film focused on the Kansas City area, showcasing the body horror and devastation wreaked by nuclear bombs.
At the time, it was the most viewed television film in history, reaching nearly 39 million households. Its impact on the country—and U.S.........© New Republic
