If you’ve been to a grocery store lately or filled up your car with gas, you’ve probably noticed how it costs a little less than just a few months ago and a lot less than the height of the Biden administration. That’s not an accident, it is what President Donald Trump promised to do. While some people might complain about how it wasn’t “fast enough” for them – for some people, anything short of immediate or sooner is too slow – prices on almost everything have been heading in the right direction since Democrats lost power.
That, however, is not good enough. What I mean by that is simple: with midterms lurking around the corner, elections are about continuing what you’re doing and what you’re going to do next, not rewards for what you’ve done. This, I think, was a flaw in President Trump’s 2020 reelection campaign where he focused an awful lot of having delivered tax cuts years earlier, which voters had already adapted to and, quite frankly, forgotten about because their spending habits had adapted.
Remind voters of what you’ve done, then tell them that you’re going to do more. That’s how you win.
President Trump has learned that. His second term is not being spent doing end zone dances over previous touchdowns, they’re working to do more and more. This is an important push because, thanks to a couple of feckless Republicans In Name Only in the Senate and the slimmest of majorities in the House, this White House has had to resort to executive actions to get things done, which can be overturned much easier than legislation by a future President.
That means that what is done by executive action needs to be impactful and helpful to the point that undoing it is almost as politically painful as repealing a law is difficult legislatively. The price has to be too high – preferably because so many people love and benefit from it – that undoing it would be stupid.
Of course, giving how Joe Biden swept in and undid everything useful at the border Trump had done, some politicians are simply hell-bent for destruction. But most, even the ones with crazy ideas, are sane enough to reject slicing off their noses to spite their faces.
Those are the kinds of actions – the ones for which there would be a political price to pay for undoing – President Trump needs to focus on.
And he’s found one, a big one: prescription drugs.
I’m a big fan of prescription drugs, with my mother having been kept alive a long time with the aid of them, but they can be tricky. Bad moves have consequences that will hurt people, so treading lightly is important.
What President Trump is doing now is something I can’t argue with politically; demanding Americans not have to carry the weight of profits and research and development for the pharmaceutical industry for the entire world.
On Truth Social, the President released a letter he sent to the CEOs of more than a dozen pharmaceutical companies reading, in part, “Right now, brand name drug prices in the United States are up to three times higher on average than elsewhere for the identical medicines. This unacceptable burden on hardworking American families ends with my Administration.” His plan to address this is immediate and impactful; it will be felt in people’s pockets on something that matters on a very personal level.
The plan has 4 components, first “Extend Most-Favored-Nation (MFN) pricing to Medicaid,” which means Medicaid patients will pay the average price from around the world for a prescription, not the much higher price they used to be charged. Second, this policy extends beyond existing drugs to all new drugs entering the market. Third, this move will force a harder hand in negotiations with foreign countries on the prices they set elsewhere, leading them to actually increase what they pay and more revenue for those companies. Those increased revenues “be repatriated to lower drug prices for American patients and taxpayers through an explicit agreement with the United States.”
“Make no mistake,” the President wrote, “a collaborative effort towards achieving global pricing parity would be the most effective path for companies, the government, and American patients. But if you refuse to step up, we will deploy every tool in our arsenal to protect American families from continued abusive drug pricing practices.”
The President ends by saying, “Americans are demanding lower drug prices. and they need them today. Other nations have been freeloading on U.S. innovation for far too long: it is time they pay their fair share."
This is undeniably true, and another example of Donald Trump’s ability to lean into an 80/20 issue, where the overwhelming majority of Americans will be on his side. This puts Democrats in the position of either agreeing with him or opposing him on something voters support in huge numbers. Politically, it is brilliant and will help Republicans in the midterms. If you thought Democrats were in disarray before…
Derek Hunter is the host of the Derek Hunter Show on WMAL in Washington, DC, and has a free daily podcast (subscribe!) and author of the book, Outrage, INC., which exposes how liberals use fear and hatred to manipulate the masses, and host of the weekly “Week in F*cking Review” podcast where the news is spoken about the way it deserves to be. Follow him on Twitter at @DerekAHunter.