Donald Trump the Megathread part II - mod warnings in OP, Updated 18/03/25

Looks like he is about to tariff PHARMA. Trump announces this at the National Republican Congressional Committee Tuesday night.

"We're gonna tariff our pharmaceuticals and once we do that they're going to come rushing back," he said. "The advantage we have over everybody is that we're the big market. We're going to be announcing very shortly a major tariff on pharmaceuticals."

https://www.salon.com/2025/04/08/theyre-kissing-my-ass-says-tariffs-are-going-great-promises-duty-on-pharmaceuticals/

https://www.reuters.com/markets/rates-bonds/global-markets-tariffs-treasuries-analysis-2025-04-09/

This is a good explainer article on what's happening and why

And what American's should be asking themselves is why are they the biggest market for pharmaceutical drugs.

Surely that'll be the straw that breaks the camels back. Pharma make money hand over fist peddling price gouged paracetamol to US citizens. Messing with that will make a lot of their CEO's furious

Financiers for one. The party is run on donations. His stupidity has been harming their interests big time over the past few weeks. He is NOT A GOD and needs to to disabused of that idea, not confirmed in it.

They'll just announce a silly figure 'we're gonna invest a trillion dollars in US facilities' Trump will claim the win. That investment will never happen because it takes at least half decade to commission a new biopharma facility even if the experienced and trained staff were available.

And with DOGE and RFK in charge of the FDA they won't have the staff or funding required to validate all these new facilities so no foreign markets would trust those facilities are safe and allow imports.

Monoclonal antibodies are incredibly valuable drugs but also very dangerous if not manufactured careful. (and the process is incredibly precise) It has happened in the past that some patients had their own immune systems turn against them from receiving a bad dose of a biopharma drug. Cytokine release syndrome

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6003181/

He isn’t within an asses roar of 2.5 or 2.8. I doubt he’s below 12.5. He takes a gimme for anything inside 6 feet, so you could add 4 or 5 shots a round easily for that. Someone mentioned the round with Bryson…his putting stroke looks like he’s trying to gut a fish. Probably explains the gimmes.

It's the people using have to pay the tariff, surely they have some voice also.

YOu can't read anything into "major". That word, along with "beautiful" and a few others, is used by Trump as a filler. It has literally zero meaning.

Trump has previously suggested pharmaceutical tariffs of "25% or higher", but Trump often suggests things that he does not follow through with. Saying now that the tariffs will be "major" doesn't really give us much more to work with.

Not directly with Trump; he doesn't care about them. But Republican congressmen will be worried about the mid-term elections due in November next year, and they will be at least a bit attentive to constituents' concerns about the price of drugs. They have so far proved completely spineless when resisting anything Trump wants, but as the election approaches that may change.

(Congress does control tariffs; the President only has authority to impose tariffs in response to an emergency, and if Congress doesn't like the way he exercises that power it can overrule him.)

There are often a couple of different drugs that can be used to treat the same condition. If one of them secures a price advantage by relocating production to the US and so avoiding the tariffs, they can expect health insurers to encourage/pressure doctors to prescribe that drug in preference to the more expensive alternatives that are still produced abroad and imported. Hence there's the prospect of a competitive advantage for the pharma company that onshores production of at least some drugs.

But it's an unstable advantage, since at any time another pharma company might onshore the production of its drug. So it would be risky to invest a lot in onshoring production in the expectation of being the only company to do so. And relocating pharma production facilities is very expensive; pharma companies won't do it unless they are convinced that the Trump tariffs are a permanent feature. Since virtually nothing Trump does is permanent, they'll be slow to come to that conclusion.

For all his talk of job creation I assume all this is going to have a hugely detrimental effect on the very working class jobs in the docks and shipping.

As night follows day .. pharma stocks getting hammered it seems

if he ever decides to ‘tariff’ services and EU reciprocate then it is truly chaos…

Dow futures are positive but we'll see when China retaliates

Ive been saying this since January.

There isn't a shadow of a doubt about it.

Trumps own assets arent even in a blind trust as they ethically should be. They're in his revocable trust, managed by his sons