Let Them Eat Nothing

A White House press conference that defied parody—and reveals something much deeper about the Trump administration.

Ozempic for everyone! SNAP benefits for none! Such is the rallying cry of the Trump administration. At the White House press conference yesterday, which announced a deal with drug manufacturers Eli Lilly and Novo Nordisk to make GLP-1 drugs more affordable, RFK Jr. called obesity a disease of poverty (a dubious claim on at least two counts), and Dr. Oz claimed that Americans would lose 135 billion pounds by the mid-term elections. (And, no, he didn’t just misspeak: he touted the new estimate over the previous 125 million pound figure.) That would amount to losing approximately 400lb per person. You don’t have to be a critic of weight loss like I am to find that promise at least slightly alarming.

These drugs will be available for $149 a month at TrumpRX.com. I am not kidding.

Why don’t they just put Ozempic in the water and be done with it? If poor people stop eating, maybe they won’t have the energy to protest the fact that they can’t buy food anymore anyway. And it’s not as if consent is a stumbling block for this president. As the press conference in fact demonstrated: Trump listed off members of his team and told the world they were on Ozempic. (“Steve, where’s Steve, head of public relations for the White House—he’s taking it.”) But hey, it’s only a HIPAA violation if you’re not above federal regulations.

I am still coming to terms with the fact that Dr. Oz promised “more Trump babies” during this same press conference. It was a nightmarish image, as well as a total non-sequitur. And then he called providing Ozempic in the name of MAHA a moral imperative. Meanwhile, the moral imperative to provide SNAP benefits and other forms of hunger relief did not rate a mention.

And then an unidentified man (initially incorrectly clocked as Novo Nordisk executive Gordon Findlay) collapsed in the Oval Office, resulting in a Getty Image that told a thousand words about the current administration.

That face: the profound indifference of a man who truly does not care about other human beings. And it’s an encapsulation of empirical findings that explain so much about the current dystopian mess we’re in as a country.