Legal AF by MeidasTouch - Trump Donors Get INSTANTLY BETRAYED by him

Episode Date: December 28, 2024

Add Big Pharma to a growing list of “disappointed” Trump and MAGA donors and voters, having bet heavily on a Trump win, but now facing a national ban on all drug advertising called for by potential Top health official RFK jr and Elon Musk. Michael Popok explains how Big Pharma got duped by Trump and probably wishes it had its hundreds of millions in donations back. Mint Mobile: Get a 3-month premium wireless plan for just $15 a month when you go to https://mintmobile.com/LEGALAF Remember to subscribe to ALL the MeidasTouch Network Podcasts: MeidasTouch: https://www.meidastouch.com/tag/meidastouch-podcast Legal AF: https://www.meidastouch.com/tag/legal-af MissTrial: https://meidasnews.com/tag/miss-trial The PoliticsGirl Podcast: https://www.meidastouch.com/tag/the-politicsgirl-podcast The Influence Continuum: https://www.meidastouch.com/tag/the-influence-continuum-with-dr-steven-hassan Mea Culpa with Michael Cohen: https://www.meidastouch.com/tag/mea-culpa-with-michael-cohen The Weekend Show: https://www.meidastouch.com/tag/the-weekend-show Burn the Boats: https://www.meidastouch.com/tag/burn-the-boats Majority 54: https://www.meidastouch.com/tag/majority-54 Political Beatdown: https://www.meidastouch.com/tag/political-beatdown On Democracy with FP Wellman: https://www.meidastouch.com/tag/on-democracy-with-fpwellman Uncovered: https://www.meidastouch.com/tag/maga-uncovered Coalition of the Sane: https://meidasnews.com/tag/coalition-of-the-sane Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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90 days in advance. Perfect for all you forward thinkers and planning gurus. Reserve your Uber ride up to 90 days in advance. Uber Reserve. See Uber app for details. Well, we can now add Big Pharma, pharmaceutical companies to that growing list of disappointed voters and supporters of Donald Trump, who now are having second thoughts and probably want to re-trade because of new policies that Donald Trump's top health officials are proposing to ban drug ads on television. I'm Michael Popock.

You're on the Midas Touch Network and on Legal AF. We've done a number of profiles of disappointed Trump voters and MAGA voters all across America who didn't understand Donald Trump's agriculture policy or didn't understand Donald Trump's policy related to immigration or undocumented people and how that would ravage their industry in particular. Now add to that list, Pharma, who donated hundreds of millions of dollars to Donald Trump, both with their domestic companies

and their foreign companies. And now, RFK Jr., Elon Musk, the head of the Federal Communications Commission, all nominees for Donald Trump are all against big ads on television by Big Pharma. Let's break it down right here. So let's talk about what is happening. As we all know, we're all bombarded with medical ads and ads for drugs all the time. Donald Trump back in 2016 tried to ban them originally, mainly because Big Pharma was donating heavily to Democratic causes and not to him. And so to pay them back, he decided to force them to give the price of the drug on the ad. That was shot down by a federal judge

who said that's something for Congress to do, not the executive branch in the way that they issue executive orders. Fast forward now, Donald Trump's top pick to be our top health official is RFK Jr. Right. The guy who doesn't believe in science or medicine, who believes in just, we should just have an open marketplace of ideas that will include both the debunked conspiracy theories and anti-vax ideas and the ones that actually have some sort of medical or health efficacy. Put them all together and let the American people sort it out on social media. That's sort of what the guy who wants to be the top health official wants to do. Elon Musk, who's not involved apparently in pharmaceuticals and doesn't have any business interest in that regards, is also against big

pharma and advertising on television. Add to that list not only the person who's going to head the federal drug administration, the FDA who regulates drugs and this type of thing, also add to it the person that Donald Trump has nominated to be the head of the Federal Communications Commission, Brendan Carr. He has said, even though he's not a doctor either or a scientist, he said, we're just too medicated as a society. So now all of Donald Trump's nominees are coalescing around this idea that big pharma should not

be allowed to advertise on television. It's very similar and reminds me back in the 70s when everybody ganged up appropriately, responsibly on big tobacco to get tobacco ads off of television and in magazines. When I was a kid growing up, we used to watch not only television shows and movies and talk shows where people were smoking, but they would glamorize it in ads, in ads in commercials on television, in magazine ads, in billboards in Times Square. Remember the Marlboro man with a big puffed smoke ring coming out of his hole? As a child. I love that as a child.

Of course, I didn't really understand the ramifications of it. So it's sort of like that, but now it's really, look at what Big Pharma has tried to do to convince Donald Trump not to ban these drugs and the amount of money that they've donated all apparently for naught. Amgen, I'll just take two of the top American pharmaceutical companies, Amgen and Pfizer. Amgen, the vast majority of the money that they donated during this last election cycle, was to Republicans and Donald Trump. Pfizer, the same thing. Both of them come in at about 63% to Republicans and the rest smattered among Democrats. Even foreign pharmaceutical companies who, through PACs, can contribute

– it's weird, it seems to be illegal, but they're allowed to do it, through political action committees, they can donate to American causes. And so the PACs abroad of the pharmaceutical giants of Roche, Novartis, and AstraZeneca have also donated and over- over donated to Republican causes. Apparently all for naught. And look at the amount of money that flows into the advertising and marketing campaigns of these drug companies. It is astronomical. Let me give you the numbers. This year alone, 2024 ending, five billion with a B, billion dollars being spent by pharmaceutical companies on drug ads in the United States, five billion.

But that is dwarfed by other marketing that pharmaceutical companies do to try to get doctors to prescribe their drugs. $31 billion this last year was a giveaway in free prescriptions, free samples, given by drug companies to various doctors to get them to hand them out to patients. So that's 31 billion. Another 10 billion was spent by the combined pharmaceutical companies for both in-person meetings and sales reps

calling people on the phone, doctors on the phone, healthcare providers on the phone to get them to dispense their drugs. So you've got $41 billion on just marketing. You got $5 billion on advertising. You see where this is going. You know when you discover a new binge-worthy show or a song that you bump on repeat

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have a First Amendment right to advertise their wares. They're not dangerous. The tobacco companies had a different argument or had a weak argument because they had a killer product, let's be frank. Getting tobacco off the streets and out of the mouths of children and adults, you know, that was a good health, there was a good health benefit to that. But these are drugs that presumably are helping people. Now Robert Kennedy likes to say things like, America is over-medicated, we heard that from Brendan Carr as well, and that these drugs are not making America healthier. He likes to point out that there's only two

countries that allow pretty much unregulated drug advertising, New Zealand and the United States, and he contends the rest of the world is much healthier and makes the link, although I really don't see the scientific or statistical link between drug advertising and people's public health. our drug advertising and people's public health. But be that as it may, I'm not against regulation, reasonable regulation of commercial speech, reasonable regulation of advertising. They shouldn't be able to say anything they want about the health benefits.

I mean, Lord knows I've sat through enough ads where it seems like half the ad is the risk and the side effects, which by the time you're done, you wouldn't wanna use that product anyway. But regulation is one thing, banning is another, and I just don't see how they're ultimately through a federal court system,

constitutional law and the First Amendment gonna be able to adequately ban these types of things from being advertised, regulated. I'm all for regulation, appropriate regulation, but that's not what they're trying to do here. So I think at the core of this particular analysis is the fact that they bet on the wrong horse. If they thought that by over donating to Donald Trump and MAGA, it would result in them having a free run in advertising, not happening. And they're probably regretting the dollars that they spent to support Donald Trump at this point, and ultimately his head of the health department, National Health Department, Robert F. Kennedy Jr.,

if he gets confirmed and the rest. Now look, let me tell you, this is also a prelude to what we're going to be doing on the Midas Touch Network and on Legal AF in the coming weeks. The confirmation hearings, which are going to be coming up, we're going to do some of them live with live feeds on Legal AF and the Midas Touch Network. We're going to be doing commentary about them. It is important to have these people who have been nominated for these top jobs that impact and have our national security, our national health, our defense, and our other major policies in the palm of their hands that they stand and deliver,

and that the Democrats do their job to cross-examine these people to within an inch of their life, and that we see who these people are as transparently as possible before we put pressure on our elected officials to reject the most obscenely unqualified of them. And we're going to do all that right here. There's a reason we formed Legal AF, the YouTube channel over, go find us, we collaborate with the Midas Touch Network. We formed it just before the election to be ready just for this moment in time to help us and our audience Understand what is happening in the intersection of law and politics because that is going to be where unfortunately we're all or fortunately

We're all going to be living over the next four years as Donald Trump and his team here lurches from one Constitutional crisis to another and the federal courts are going to be asked to intervene on an almost daily basis. I'm glad you're here. I'm Michael Popak. Follow me also. I got a new show here on the Midas Touch Network on Tuesdays. Popak Live, 8 p.m. It's like this but longer. I even take questions and I give answers and commentary and analysis. Now more than ever independent media companies like the Midas Touch Network and Legal AF need your support, not owned by corporations that worry more about corporate

profits than the First Amendment and freedom of the press. We have no outside investors. We are people-powered, literally, by your involvement, by your being part of the audience, and being an active part of the audience, and part of our Midas Mighty and the Legal AFers. That's how we got here, and that's how we're gonna get to our next destination. So until my next report, I'm Michael Popock. In collaboration with the Midas Touch Network, we just launched the Legal AF YouTube channel.

Help us build this pro-democracy channel, where I'll be curating the top stories the intersection of law and politics. Go to YouTube now and free subscribe at LegalAFMTN. That's at LegalAFMTN.