The Trump administration pressured the US Food and Drug Administration to approve fruit-flavoured e-cigarettes as internal polling showed the president's support among young Americans collapsing to its lowest point of his second term.
The Wall Street Journal reported on 5 May 2026 that President Donald Trump rebuked FDA Commissioner Marty Makary over the weekend for failing to move quickly enough on flavoured vaping products, with advisers describing the agency chief as a 'problem for the administration.'
The rebuke came the same day the FDA authorised four fruit-flavoured electronic cigarettes from Los Angeles-based manufacturer Glas Inc., marking the agency's first approval of non-tobacco, non-menthol vaping products in US history. The sequence of events raised immediate questions about whether a scientific regulatory body had bowed to direct presidential pressure for electoral gain.
Trump's 'Save Vaping' Pledge and Its Political Arithmetic
In September 2024, following a private meeting with a leading vaping industry lobbyist, Trump posted on his Truth Social platform: 'I saved Flavored Vaping in 2019, and it greatly helped people get off smoking. I raised the age to 21, keeping it away from the kids. I'll save vaping again!' The promise was aimed squarely at a demographic the Trump campaign believed it was winning: young, predominantly male voters who had shifted toward the Republican party by double digits compared to 2020.
That political calculation has since unravelled sharply. An NBC News Decision Desk Poll powered by SurveyMonkey, conducted from 30 March to 13 April 2026 among 3,009 adults aged 18 to 29, found that 76 per cent of Americans under 30 disapprove of Trump's job performance, with just 24 per cent approving.
The margin of error for the Gen Z subgroup was plus or minus 2.4 percentage points. The 12-point swing toward disapproval since August 2025 represents the fastest rate of erosion among any age group tracked in the survey.
The polling showed that Gen Z's top concerns were the economy (27 per cent), threats to democracy (19 per cent) and immigration (14 per cent). A fruit-flavoured e-cigarette authorisation, however symbolically significant to the vaping industry, addressed none of those priorities. Sixty per cent of respondents under 30 said they strongly disapproved of Trump's handling of the economy.
Inside the White House Pressure Campaign on the FDA
According to the Wall Street Journal's reporting, Trump grew frustrated after learning that Makary had declined to authorise blueberry, mango and menthol-flavoured vapes from Glas Inc., a manufacturer that had applied through the premarket tobacco product application (PMTA) pathway.
Advisers told the president that Makary was blocking his vaping agenda and described the commissioner as a 'problem for the administration.' Sources told the Journal that Makary was 'on thin ice.'
The White House publicly denied Makary was at risk. A spokesperson stated that Trump was 'thrilled' with the commissioner's accomplishments. Makary, confirmed by the Senate in March 2025 as the 27th FDA commissioner, had reportedly resisted approving fruit-flavoured products out of concern they would appeal to underage users. His position aligned with longstanding FDA policy, which had historically required manufacturers to demonstrate that a product's benefits to adult smokers outweighed any risk of youth uptake.
The pressure on Makary also coincided with separate frustrations within the administration over the FDA's pace on rare-disease drug approvals, according to the Journal's account. The vaping dispute appeared to be one thread in a wider contest between the White House and the agency's leadership over regulatory direction and speed.
What the FDA Authorised and the Age-Gating Technology at Its Centre
On 5 May 2026, the FDA issued a formal press release confirming it had authorised four Glas electronic nicotine delivery systems (ENDS) through the PMTA pathway. Each product contains 50mg/ml of tobacco-derived nicotine. The authorised pods are marketed under the names Classic Menthol, Fresh Menthol, Gold and Sapphire, with Gold and Sapphire being the mango and blueberry variants respectively.
The FDA stressed that the authorisation applied only to those four specific products and did not constitute a blanket approval for any other Glas line. Central to the decision was a mandatory digital age-verification system: users must verify their age via a government-issued photo ID on a smartphone before the device operates. The e-cigarette then functions only when connected via Bluetooth to that verified phone. Bret Koplow, acting director of the FDA's Center for Tobacco Products, said in the press release: 'By helping to prevent youth use, device access restrictions are a potential game changer.'
The FDA confirmed it retained authority to suspend or withdraw the authorisation if youth usage increased or if the benefits no longer outweighed the risks. The agency noted that teen vaping rates had fallen to a 10-year low, a point cited by those who welcomed the decision. Critics, however, pointed out that the Biden administration's systematic rejection of more than a million fruit and candy flavour applications was what drove those numbers down, and that the reversal risks undoing that progress. The approval also represents a sharp reversal from Trump's own first term, when his administration enacted a limited ban on mint and fruit-flavoured cartridge-based e-cigarettes in 2020.
Whether Tuesday's decision represents sound public health policy or political medicine for a president haemorrhaging youth support may ultimately be answered by the data the FDA says it now intends to collect.
