Closing summary
This concludes our live coverage of another week in the life of the second Trump administration. Here’s what we learned:
The nation is the hands of a president in rude health, a 79-year-old with the heart of a 65-year-old, fully immunized against Covid and the flu, according a note from his doctor following his second physical in six months.
Donald Trump claimed that an inhaler made by the British pharmaceutical company AstraZeneca would soon be available, from the new US government website TrumpRx, at a 654% discount. The math here is unclear.
The secretary of defense, Pete Hegseth, was forced to issue a clarification on social media, hours after he publicly signed what he called “a letter of acceptance” to build a Qatari air force facility in Idaho. The plan is not to build a foreign military base on US soil, as the former Fox weekend anchor at first seemed to suggest.
For at least the third time in recent weeks, the president of the United States publicly stated his firm belief in the entirely imaginary claim that very few stores remain in business in Portland, Oregon, and the few that continue to operate are constructed entirely of plywood, to make them easier to rebuild after serial arson attacks and looting, which are not, in fact, happening.
Hours after not winning the Nobel peace prize he had openly campaigned for, Donald Trump said that his threats of violence against Hamas had convinced the Palestinian militants to agree to a deal to exchange Israeli hostages for Palestinian prisoners and an end to Israel’s US-backed offensive in Gaza.
Reigniting his trade war with China, and sending stocks plummeting, Trump announced that, in response to what he called China’s “extraordinarily aggressive position on Trade”, he intends to “impose a Tariff of 100% on China, over and above any Tariff that they are currently paying” starting on 1 November.
Trump claims that inhaler that costs $645 will be offered at 654% discount
At one point during an event on lower drug prices for US consumers on Friday, Donald Trump pointed to a chart in the Oval Office which indicated that an inhaler made by the British pharmaceutical company AstraZeneca would soon be available, from the new US government website TrumpRx, at a 654% discount.
No one asked what this could possibly mean, but the math here is exceedingly unclear. As numerous reporters have noted, it is just mathematically impossible to offer a discount of more than 100% of the price on any item, without giving it away for free and providing a payment to the consumer.
According to a White House fact sheet, the drug Bevespi Aerosphere, an inhaler used to treat chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), “will be made available to patients purchasing directly at a discount equal to 654% of the deal price.”
No explanation of the calculation was provided.
Curiously, a letter from Bernie Sanders, the Vermont senator, and three colleagues sent last year to AstraZeneca asked why a similar product, the Breztri Aerosphere inhaler, costs $645 in the US but just $49 in the UK.
A visit to the website TrumpRx offered no details, just a promise that it would be in operation in January 2026 and a large photograph of Donald Trump, seated in the Oval Office, apparently during his first term, before the painting of Andrew Jackson was swapped out for one of Ronald Reagan, and a lot of gold trim was added.
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