Ezra Klein

He did cherry pick some things that are down because there were supply chain disruptions during the pandemic on particular goods.

But inflation, it's not crazy.

But it's around what it was in the final year of Joe Biden's presidency.

And prices for Americans have not come down.

He's not done a lot to bring them down either.

But it's a hard thing for any president to bring the price level down.

But he has neither significantly tried nor has he –

And just telling people that you have when you haven't is a dumb move.

You know, Yuval Levin, the conservative policy scholar, I had him on the show a month or two back.

And a point he makes that I think is very sharp about Trump is that Trump governs retail, not wholesale.

That he governs through these individual deals with countries, with companies, not by doing things that change policy for the most part all across the country.

Now, immigration is a counterexample to this, and to some degree, the tariffs are a counterexample to this.

But something you really saw last night was,

was Trump bragging about a series of very individual, usually modest policies, some of which are not even really policies.

So Trump Rx are individual negotiations the Trump administration has been doing with drug manufacturers through tariff.

debates and negotiations.

So you can get cheaper Wegovy through TrumpRx because as part of the tariff negotiations, Trump was able to extract that.

It's not a crazy move, but it's not going to allow you to bring down prescription drug prices across the economy.

You'd actually need to pass legislation and have Medicare do across the board bargaining for that.

And the thing that's happening around the TrumpRx move is that he's extracting cheaper prices on individual drugs, and then those manufacturers are raising prices on the other drugs.