John Cassidy

NOTABLE -- Pam Bondi refuses to answer direct questions about if the FBI has incriminating photos of Trump with half-naked young women, but instead deflects from them by attacking Sen. Whitehouse

Donald Trump’s Big Pharma Showdown Ends with a Whimper Wall Street is celebrating the White House’s deal with Pfizer on drug prices. Patients shouldn’t be.

My latest, on Trump's agreement with Pfizer and how his bark turned into a whimper.

"It’s a lot of nothing.“For most people, it will have very little effect on drug prices”--Prof Craig Garthwaite, head of healthcare studies at the Kellogg School of Management

1/n

www.newyorker.com/news/the-fin...

4/4 A key issue is whether Pfizer will cut the cost of new drugs to match lower prices overseas, as the WH claims.
Details are sparse, but Conti said drugmakers could end up raising prices overseas instead. No wonder drug stocks have bounced since the announcement.

3/n As for the proposed TrumpRX website, Garthwaite and Conti said the vast majority of people will find it much cheaper to get branded prescription drugs through their insurance plans and pay the co-payments. Some people with no insurance could benefit, but costs would still be high.

2/n

Drugmakers and investors in drug stocks had feared price controls and hefty tariffs on branded drugs: Pfizer will face neither. The reforms it agreed to are "fiddling around the edges," Rena Conti, an economist at Boston University’s Questrom School of Business, told me

Donald Trump’s Big Pharma Showdown Ends with a Whimper Wall Street is celebrating the White House’s deal with Pfizer on drug prices. Patients shouldn’t be.

My latest, on Trump's agreement with Pfizer and how his bark turned into a whimper.

"It’s a lot of nothing.“For most people, it will have very little effect on drug prices”--Prof Craig Garthwaite, head of healthcare studies at the Kellogg School of Management

1/n

www.newyorker.com/news/the-fin...

What are they hiding? asks Pentagon reporter Barbara Starr PLUS -- Trump's invasion of Illinois is (another) seminal moment.

NEWS: The Pentagon is considering sending the elite military unit that invaded Iraq & Afghanistan into U.S. cities.

The 82nd Airborne Division.

Wake up, people. This not about petty theft and street crime.

www.treason.io/p/what-are-t...

Donald Trump’s Big Pharma Showdown Ends with a Whimper Wall Street is celebrating the White House’s deal with Pfizer on drug prices. Patients shouldn’t be.

In place of real reform to bring down drug prices, we now have Donald Trump’s agreement with Pfizer. @johncassidysays.bsky.social explains how Trump’s bark turned into a whimper.

Court blocks Trump's effort to avoid prior injunction by sending out of state National Guard to invade Portland

Chicago priest Father Michael Pfleger: "The state of emergency is in AMERICA, not Chicago. It's birthed from this president and his admin's reign of terror."

( ht: @mikenellis.bsky.social )

Brooklyn chillin’ at Atlantic Antic.

The lesson of the Trump era is to stick with your principles. He’s coming for you anyway, whether you do or not, so you might as well stick to your principles so people don’t laugh at you afterward and you can look yourself in the mirror.

Not for nothing, but the law says you gotta be two years dead to be on a coin. And also, the law expired in 2016. But whatevs, I guess.

The wheel of history turns slowly but turn it does.

Text: The single most important problem for pro-democracy forces is that too many people — especially in position of power — seem unable to truly believe that we are living in a consolidating competitive authoritarian regime. Perhaps they are too habituated to the "rules" of the system that no longer exists. Perhaps they still cling to the drug of American exceptionalism, which makes it difficult for them to accept that "it can happen here." Perhaps they understand it intellectually, but find it too difficult to make the necessary paradigm shift.

from @dhnexon.bsky.social www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2025/10/the-...

South Shore Residents Return To Ransacked Apartments After ICE Raid: 'It Looks Like Hell' A "now renting" sign outside touts granite countertops. Inside, residents are trying to make sense of the raid that made their already neglected building even worse.

What’s happening to this country? Sadly the answer is obvious.

blockclubchicago.org/2025/10/02/s...

The DEMS should commit now that any US military who loses their job for refusing an order to fire on US citizens will have any lost pay and pension fully restored, along with a promotion and a newly minted medal honoring this specific valor, when the DEMS return to the White House.

Now it's defense treaties by executive order. Just another day in the Twilight Zone.

One wonders what the US generals are thinking as they fly back to their military bases around the word. "WTF" figures prominently, I would imagine.

This is the right framing.

Americans’ Support for Israel Dramatically Declines, Times/Siena Poll Finds

Paging Schumer and Jeffries.

www.nytimes.com/2025/09/29/p...

Don't know much about Judge Young but if we ever get through this whoever is in power should put a statue of him up outside the Supreme Court.

Don't know much about Judge Young but if we ever get through this whoever is in power should put a statue of him up outside the Supreme Court.

Amen.

Donald Trump’s TikTok Deal Looks Like Crony Capitalism The sale demonstrates the President’s personal brand of industrial policy—transactional, opaque, and designed to politically benefit him and his allies.

“State Capitalism with Trumpian Characteristics”

--with a h/t to Greg Ip and Deng Xiaoping

www.newyorker.com/news/the-fin...

Good start. Next move should be moving the corporate HQ back to Seattle.

Amen.

Free passes. Every day. Since January 2021. Schumer, Jeffries, & company deserve all the criticism. But they are not the ones who are deciding whether democracy will survive or not. And they haven't been, for years now. This is a truly exhausting feature of the endless National Conversation™️

Trump telling US generals they have to fight the "enemy within" and the "war within." No wonder there was no applause.

Donald Trump’s TikTok Deal Looks Like Crony Capitalism The sale demonstrates the President’s personal brand of industrial policy—transactional, opaque, and designed to politically benefit him and his allies.

Bringing the U.S. arm of TikTok into the MAGA fold seems like part of Donald Trump’s grand project to concentrate power and rout his perceived enemies, @johncassidysays.bsky.social writes.