On Monday, during a routine press event, president Donald Trump casually made an announcement that in any normal White House would have kicked off days of frenzied coverage — either about a revelatory inflection point in the history of medicine, or about the mental wellness of the country’s chief executive.
The president’s apparent claim? That an unnamed new drug can bring patients back from the dead.
“We’ve taken people that were dead,” Trump fomented. “We had a person given the last rites — gone, the kids are crying and everything — and started them on this drug. And the person became better. It works.”
You think we’re joking? Here’s the clip:
During both Trump’s stints in office, America has become exhaustingly accustomed to an extremely well-documented barrage of lies and untruths that are remarkable even by the already-low standards of the average politician. (The president’s representatives often tries to spin the fibs in outrageous ways: perhaps “dead” didn’t mean “dead,” they might argue, but was simply the president’s colorful way of saying somebody was very sick; in the end, the layers upon layers of untruths just become an impenetrable miasma of post-truth bloviation.)
In the case of the supposed miracle pharmaceutical this week, rewind the full video far enough — for an added bonus, watch the face of Administrator for the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services Mehmet Oz, who’s standing in the background, as the whole thing goes down — and you can vaguely reconstruct how the line ended up coming out of Trump’s voluble mouth.
He’d been talking about the Right to Try Act, a bit of legislation passed during his first administration that allows terminally ill patients to attempt long-shot treatments that would normally be seen as too risky or under-tested. But in typical Trump fashion, the president seems to have taken the idea of a very sick patient suddenly improving — which is rare, but does occasionally happen — and exaggerated it to such a ludicrous degree that it sounds like the plot to a zombie movie.
It’s also worth noting that, as with much of Trump’s political storytelling, the actual track record of the Right to Try Act is hotly disputed: as Stat reported in 2024, patients already had the option to opt for experimental treatments before it was passed — though the new law did undermine their right to legal recourse if they were preyed upon by quack doctors in that highly vulnerable moment of their lives.
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