A recent Trump press conference about a deal he negotiated to lower the price of weight-loss drugs was overshadowed by an incident in which a man in the background fainted and Trump stood by, blank and indifferent, which instantly became a kind of symbol for his presidency.
But many didn’t notice that in the middle of the event, Trump tried to shake down pharmaceutical maker Novo Nordisk on live TV.
The New Republic pulls out this exchange:
At a White House press conference Thursday announcing lower costs for weight-loss drugs, Donald Trump decided to ask for part of a company.
Trump was sitting at his desk in the Oval Office surrounded by health officials from his administration, as well as executives from pharmaceutical companies Novo Nordisk and Eli Lilly. When a reporter asked the president about Novo Nordisk’s acquisition of an obesity biotech company, Trump quipped to CEO Maziar Mike Doustdar, “Maybe you should give us a piece of the company like I’ve been asking for, give the United States a nice big chunk of the company.”
Doustdar chuckled but ignored the president’s suggestion and went on to explain the acquisition. It’s unclear how serious Trump is about asking for a piece of the pharmaceutical giant, but his government has already taken stakes in several American companies, including U.S. Steel, Intel, Trilogy Metals, Lithium Americas, and MP Materials.
The deal on weight-loss drugs was secured through Trump’s illegal abuse of tariffs and an apparent threat to use the FTC to block a Novo Nordisk acquisition. Trump’s economic policy is not about free markets but about him as deal-maker-in-chief and the personal manager of the U.S. economy. In his own analogy, America is a giant store, and he owns it.
The Executive Watch is a project of the Institute for the Study of Modern Authoritarianism, and its flagship publication The UnPopulist, to track in an ongoing way the abuses of the power of the American presidency. It sorts these abuses into five categories: Personal Grift, Political Corruption, Presidential Retribution, Power Consolidation, and Policy Illegality. Click the category of interest to get an overview of all the abuses under it.
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