Inside Trump’s Million-Dollar Dinners With Healthcare Executives - WSJ

First came the pharmaceutical executives. 

Then the insurance companies and the hospital leaders. During two months that shattered records for presidential transitions, healthcare executives wrote among the largest checks, paying millions of dollars to attend at least six different dinners with now-President Trump before he took office, according to people familiar with them. 

In his gold-covered, chandeliered dining room just off the lobby at his Mar-a-Lago club, Trump discovered one of the most lucrative moneymaking ventures of his career, sometimes serving chopped steak, showing off his iPad playlist and listening to executives looking to bend his ear and complain about others. 

Altogether, Trump has told associates he raised about $500 million. Much of it came from the healthcare industry, which is potentially facing sharp changes under Trump’s new health secretary. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has criticized the use of vaccines, described federal health agencies as beholden to the interests of drugmakers and suggested banning television drug ads. 

The results of the late push for influence could come into sharper focus as soon as this week, when Trump is again slated to meet with pharmaceutical executives at the White House, according to people familiar with the plans.

The money, which Trump has told others he would use as a rainy-day fund, was split among Trump’s inaugural committee and various other accounts, including a large political-action committee. The inaugural committee itself raised more than $200 million, officials said. 

The story of how Trump got his record haul, according to the version he told donors in January, goes like this: He received a flood of calls from corporate executives and billionaires offering their congratulations after his election, and told his fundraisers it seemed like “a good time to raise money.” His fundraisers told him that donors needed a break after the most expensive election in history. Trump ignored the caution and told his team to start raising money again.

A Trump spokesman declined to comment. Trump raised just over $100 million for his 2017 inaugural. President Obama raised about $53 million after the 2008 election, and President Biden raised about $62 million four years ago. “Everybody who is anybody went down,” to Florida to meet Trump, said Kathryn Wylde, the leader of the Partnership for New York City, whose members include some of the biggest U.S. companies. “It was a proactive effort to not be a target,” she said.

Knocking out middlemen

Since the dinners, Trump has publicly embraced arguments he heard from the executives, even if the ideas conflicted, according to people familiar with the conversations. 

In between small talk at a November dinner, Pfizer Chief Executive Albert Bourla and the other pharmaceutical executives told Trump that insurance companies and middlemen known as pharmacy-benefit managers were to blame for high drug prices. The next month, Trump repeated their position at a news conference. “We’re going to knock out the middleman,” Trump said. “They don’t do anything.” 

Shares of PBM owners including CVS Health and UnitedHealth Group fell.

Pfizer gave $1 million to Trump’s inaugural committee and supports policies that help patients and innovation, said spokeswoman Amy Rose.

In January, the CEOs of the companies that own the three largest PBMs, as well as big insurers, had a Mar-a-Lago dinner of their own, after their companies gave at least $1 million, according to people familiar with the dinner. 

UnitedHealth’s Andrew Witty, CVS’s David Joyner and Cigna Group’s David Cordani, promised to improve consumer experiences, including working to ease the prior-authorization process that requires patients and doctors to get insurers’ approval for medical treatment, the people said. Complaints about prior authorization have helped fuel backlash against the insurance industry.

The executives also said they helped older Americans through their Medicare Advantage plans, according to two people familiar with that discussion. Drugs cost more in the U.S. than in other countries, the executives said, citing the category of weight-loss medications that includes Ozempic as an example, one of the people said. 

Trump echoed those complaints during an interview before the Super Bowl. “You go to Canada and all of the drugs are much less expensive,” Trump said, adding that he was probably going to put tariffs on pharmaceuticals. 

Others in the healthcare industry followed suit.

Vaccine manufacturers attended at least two fundraising events with Trump, people who were at the events said. At a dinner in January, an executive told Trump his company was seeking Food and Drug Administration approval on a new project. Trump asked the company whether it needed help, and it said no, the people said. 

At another dinner, Trump asked a top hospital executive why the U.S. healthcare system was so “screwed up.” As the executive explained why he believed healthcare was expensive in America, Trump told him that they had to “fix” the healthcare industry during his second term. 

“Why don’t you get some people together and fix it?” Trump said, according to a person who heard the comments. 

Kennedy also attended several of the dinners, but largely stayed quiet as Trump and others talked, surprising the executives, some of the people said. 

Hot as a pistol

All told, Trump held more than 50 meetings with business executives at his club after his election, according to 11 people familiar with the activities, highlighting the extent to which U.S. corporations have showered Trump with money hoping to avoid his public wrath and shape his thinking on esoteric issues where he has shown less policy interest. During many of the dinners, Trump seemed to be in a jovial mood and asked others what they wanted to talk about, attendees said. 

Speaking to visitors at his club in January, Trump described Mar-a-Lago as “hot as a pistol…this is the hottest club in the world.” 

Some of the dinners were industry-specific, while others were a hodgepodge of Wall Street financiers, cryptocurrency executives, lawyers, lobbyists and Florida donors. Executives including Microsoft founder Bill Gates, Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos and Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg all visited the club, carving out a path for others who wanted to go but feared blowback, according to an executive who attended a fundraising dinner. 

Even a 15-minute meeting with Trump would cost millions, Meredith O’Rourke, Trump’s top fundraiser, told others, according to people who heard her comments, though the price varied. She declined to comment through a spokesman. 

At one point, Trump’s team ran out of inauguration tickets and other perks for high-dollar donors. But some still wanted to give so that Trump would see their name on the list, they told Trump’s team. Some of the money went to Trump’s inauguration, while much of it went to a political-action committee designed to support Trump going forward.

Some in the healthcare industry had supported Trump earlier, and Trump raised millions of dollars from its executives after he asked top officials from the drug industry’s trade group, PhRMA, and others to help his campaign, according to people familiar with the matter. Some of it went into a soft-money group so they could cut larger checks. 

“We look forward to working with the Trump administration and new Congress to strengthen American leadership in biopharmaceutical innovation,” said Alex Schriver, a spokesman for PhRMA. 

Pfizer’s Bourla, who called and met with Trump during the past year, is expected to take over as president of the group this week. Trump had sometimes complained that Pfizer was too slow to develop a Covid-19 vaccine before the 2020 election, a complaint Bourla had tried to temper, people familiar with the conversations said. 

Bourla, too, held a Pfizer executive meeting at Mar-a-Lago just before Trump took office, pushing the company’s money into Trump’s businesses. 

The Pfizer spokeswoman said the company had finished the coronavirus vaccine at the “speed of science” and confirmed the executive meeting at the club.