STEALING BIDEN'S CREDIT: NOW YOU SEE IT...NOW YOU DON'T!

Trump and the White House show off Photo of "Prescription Drug Prices Record Sharpest Drop in More Than 60 Years" headline – but article credits Biden policies 

The Other 98 %

Donald Trump waved a printout at reporters on Friday to prove he lowered drug prices. The article credits Joe Biden, not him.

The headline was real. Prescription drug prices posted their sharpest drop in more than sixty years, the largest annual decline since March 1963. Trump read it aloud to the cameras, held the page out wide like he'd pulled a rabbit from a hat, and asked, "What else do I have to say?"

Here's what he could have said. 

The reporters who wrote that story called up economists to find out what was actually moving the numbers, and the economists pointed at a law he had nothing to do with.

That law is the Inflation Reduction Act. Biden signed it in 2022, and it did something no president had pulled off before: it gave Medicare the power to sit across the table from the drug companies and negotiate prices instead of paying whatever the sticker said.

The first ten negotiated prices took effect on January 1 of this year. Those ten are drugs millions of seniors actually take, which is exactly why they show up in the numbers Trump was crowing about.

Richard Frank, a Harvard health economist, told the Washington Post that if he were betting on what mattered most, it would be the Biden law. Trump's own efforts, he said, "wouldn't be where I'd place my money." A Vanderbilt professor told the paper the same thing.

Not a single Republican voted for that law. Not one, in either chamber. And the moment it passed, they started filing bills to repeal the exact negotiation power that is now driving prices down. The policy blueprint written for his second term called for gutting it.

So the man mugging for the cameras Friday was taking a bow for a result his party voted against, tried to kill, and would kill tomorrow if the polling ever let them.

This is the whole trick, and once you see it you can't unsee it. Someone else does the work, fights the fight, eats the political cost. Then the guy who stood in the doorway the entire time walks up afterward, lifts the trophy off the shelf, and holds it over his head.

The receipt was the printout in his hand. He brought it himself. He stood in front of the press pool and read out loud the proof that it wasn't him, then grinned and asked if everybody got the shot.

Everybody got the shot.