The defeat that made Ronald Reagan president.

Anyone who has spent significant time in and around political campaigns would have their own special understanding of the famous Wide-World-of-Sports descriptive: “The thrill of victory … and the agony of defeat.” And when it comes to “defeat,” that understanding often extends to the wisdom that within defeat can often come the seeds of future “victory.” Nowhere is that better illustrated than through the remarkable story of “Reagan ’76,” ripe to be remembered once again on its 50th anniversary this month.

August 1976 — precisely 50 years ago — marked a seminal turning point in the political career of Ronald Reagan, the man who would later serve two terms as America’s 40th president (1981-1989). During that year of America’s (1776-1976) Bicentennial, Reagan — a former California governor at 65 years old — spent eight months crisscrossing the country in a doomed pursuit of the 1976 Republican presidential nomination as challenger to the incumbent Republican president Gerald Ford.

In what was considered at the time to be his last best chance to win the presidency, Reagan suffered a painful defeat. But against many odds, he came back four years later to achieve an historic landslide victory. Political historians now agree that had it not been for the indispensable groundwork laid in his unsuccessful 1976 campaign, Reagan would not have had a chance of experiencing the “thrill of victory” to be elected president in 1980.

In 1976, it was a very close intra-party primary battle between Ford and Reagan, pitting the East Coast Republican establishment wing of the Party, led by Ford, against an upstart grassroots conservative insurgency led by Reagan. Throughout, there were many tumultuous twists and turns, and ups and downs. As the challenger, Reagan was the clear underdog. Ford had most of the VIP Party regulars and elected officials locked up on his side from coast to coast. At the national level, Reagan had the public endorsements of only one sitting governor, six senators, and just 10 congressmen.

The goal was to capture the majority of national convention delegates needed to win the nomination. The campaign played out through a combination of state primaries, state conventions or caucuses, and carefully targeted persuasion campaigns aimed at a smaller critical group of late-breaking uncommitted delegates. In some states, delegates were allocated proportionally in line with the primary vote percentages received by each candidate. In other states, it was winner-take-all.

In the battle for delegates, Reagan won 10 primaries (AR, CA, GA, ID, IN, NE, NC, NV, SD, and TX) and prevailed in 15 state conventions or caucuses (AL, AK, AZ, CO, HI, KS, LA, MO, MT, NM, OK, SC, UT, WA, and WY).

Meanwhile, Ford won 16 primaries (CT, FL, IL, KY, MD, MA, MI, NH, NJ, OH, OR, PA, RI, TN, VT, and WI) and prevailed in 9 state conventions or caucuses (DE, IA, ME, MN, MS, NY, ND, VA, and WV).

The magic number of delegates needed to win was 1130. It was all geared to culminate in mid-August at the Republican National Convention held in Kansas City.

By early July, six weeks before the convention and with the primaries over, both candidates were coming up short, with Ford slightly ahead.  Unofficial approximate delegate whip counts reported in the media at that time showed Ford had about 1070 delegates (60 short) and Reagan had about 1020 (110 short), with roughly 170 uncommitted.

It was at this point that Reagan’s campaign manager, John Sears, confronted the harsh reality that if something drastic was not done to shake up the campaign’s inertial dynamic, any chance for a Reagan victory at the convention was about to completely evaporate. Thus was hatched one of the most remarkable “Hail Mary” passes ever thrown in the history of American politics.

On July 26, just three weeks before the start of the convention, Reagan announced the name of the vice-presidential running mate he would choose if he were to win the nomination. This was something that had never been done before. VP running-mates are always announced at the convention by the successful candidate only after the presidential nomination has been voted on and secured.

But in this case, Reagan’s premature announcement amounted to a largely transparent and somewhat desperate campaign tactic designed to shake up the race and win more delegates for Reagan while at the same time pulling a significant number away from Ford.

Reagan’s surprise choice for VP was Pennsylvania Senator Richard Schweiker, a moderate-liberal East Coast Republican considered to be much more in line with the Ford wing of the party than with the growing conservative movement led by Reagan.

At the outset, while controversial and derided by some Reagan supporters, the ploy seemed to make tactical sense by having a possible chance of seriously breaking up the large Pennsylvania delegation that was solidly in the Ford camp. Schweiker had a close relationship with the delegation’s chairman, Drew Lewis. If Lewis also flipped to Reagan, he could easily take a dozen or more delegates with him and even encourage other states to move in the same direction.

Well, it was a nice try… but no cigar. Lewis remained solidly loyal to Ford. Only four delegates switched to Reagan, but later even most of them switched back to Ford.

Meantime, in the realm of unintended consequences, the ploy seriously alienated many southern conservatives, including Mississippi’s venerable state Republican Chairman Clarke Reed. Reed had the power and the expectation to move Mississippi’s entire 30-member delegation (one of the last uncommitted blocs going into the convention) into the Reagan column.

Reed was considered a strong Reagan supporter, but he called Reagan’s selection of Schweiker “wrong and dumb” and showing “bad judgment.” That set off fierce behind-the-scenes lobbying efforts leading up to the convention by both Ford and Reagan — and their campaigns — trying to pull Reed in opposite directions.

If Reed could put his reservations aside and bring his state’s full delegation to Reagan, it would not by itself have been enough to put Reagan over the top in delegate votes. But the Reagan team knew it would mark a huge shift of momentum in the campaign that could have helped move many more delegates in other states as well. That was the key, and why Reed’s decision would be so critical for Reagan.

As the convention opened on August 16, the drama continued; tensions were high, and the outcome was still very much uncertain. While both candidates held delegation meetings and rallies in Kansas City during convention week, no one knew for sure what secret last-minute deals or pressures might be brought to bear to sway the remaining uncommitted delegates.

On August 17, in a final attempt to move the numbers, the Reagan team forced a floor vote on a proposed procedural change in party rules. The proposed Rule 16-C would require that all party presidential candidates name their V.P. choice before the final roll call on the presidential nomination. If passed, this would have forced Ford to name his vice-presidential choice and, by so doing, possibly alienating delegates on either side of the party, and giving Reagan a chance to win more delegates to his side.

But Rule 16-C was decisively defeated by a vote of 1069-1180. That, coupled with Clarke Reed leading the Mississippi delegation to cast its 30 votes against the measure, clearly demonstrated that Reagan did not have enough votes to win the nomination.

On Aug. 18, late in the evening, the final roll call vote on the presidential nomination sealed it: 1187 delegate votes for Ford, 1070 delegate votes for Reagan. It was a hard-fought victory for Ford. It was the proverbial “agony of defeat” for the Reagan side.

For those who were part of the Reagan team at that early time — many who had worked hard for months and had held out the hope of victory right up to the last minute — it was the kind of defeat that had a decisive finality to it. At the time, it was seen by many as the absolute political end for Reagan — indeed the climactic and cinematic “The End” for the ex-movie star — not as a stepping stone for a future comeback, not as a rallying cry to “go get’em” next time.

This was because all the smart sober logic pointed to the near certainty that there would be no “next time” for Reagan… and everyone knew it, everyone felt it.  In four years, Reagan would be 69, and by any previous standard, too old to run. And if Ford won and served two terms, it would be eight years, making it totally out of the question.

The next day, Aug. 19, 1976, the final day of the convention, proved to be one of the most emotional, heart-wrenching, and — at the same time — inspirational days in the history of Reagan lore. But it was one of those things where maybe you had to actually be there to fully understand it.

Early that morning, the Reagan team of dedicated staff, volunteers, close friends and supporters — there from all corners of the country — gathered in a ballroom at the Reagan hotel to say their goodbyes and to hear a final personal word of appreciation and thanks from the Reagans before everyone scattered their separate ways home, likely, it seemed, never to see each other again in any similar setting. 

Looking around the room that morning, it appeared that everyone there was caught up in the somber emotions of the moment. As Reagan and his wife stepped up on a small stage, Nancy took one look around and, seeing so many grown men and women crying (friends all), she had to turn her back for a moment to regain her own composure. Reagan himself, with his voice cracking slightly, managed a few words of condolence:

The cause goes on. It’s just one battle in a long war and it will go on as long as we all live… Stay in there with the same beliefs and same faith that made you do what you’re doing here. The individuals on the stage may change, [but] the cause is there. And the cause will prevail because it’s right. Don’t give up your ideals, don’t compromise, don’t turn to expediency, and don’t for heaven’s sake… get cynical. Because look at yourselves and what you were willing to do and recognize that there are millions and millions of Americans out there that want what you want, that want it to be that way, that want it to be a “shining city on a hill.”

Those brief remarks were lastingly memorable to the bleary-eyed Reagan supporters who were there or watching on television. But mostly in that moment, all they did was evoke more tears.

(Side note: According to a contemporary account in The New Yorker, Clarke Reed, who many Reagan supporters felt had betrayed Reagan, showed up at the gathering looking “almost distraught.” He approached Reagan and said, “I now feel I made the worst mistake I ever made in my life.” Reagan responded only with “That’s all right, Clarke.” Years later, by the time Reagan had served as president, Reed clarified that he still thought Reagan had made a mistake by naming Schweiker, but that he had come to believe Reagan was “the best president of my lifetime.”)

Later that evening, it was the convention finale. With Reagan watching from the audience gallery of Kansas City’s packed Kemper Arena, President Ford delivered his rousing convention-closing acceptance speech.

Then unexpectedly — in a magnanimous gesture of party unity as he was basking in the applause of a tremendous standing ovation — he looked up into the stands and waved for Reagan to come down to the stage and “say a few words.”

Without notes or a teleprompter, Reagan delivered a few short but powerful remarks that — as people would say — brought down the house:

…And suddenly it dawned on me, those who would read this letter a hundred years from now will know whether those missiles were fired. They will know whether we met our challenge.  Whether they will have the freedom that we have known up until now will depend on what we do here. Will they look back with appreciation and say, Thank God for those people in 1976 who headed off that loss of freedom? Who kept us now a hundred years later free? Who kept our world from nuclear destruction? And if we fail, they probably won’t get to read the letter at all because it spoke of individual freedom and they won’t be allowed to talk of that or read of it.  This is our challenge, and this is why, here in this hall tonight, better than we’ve ever done before, we’ve got to quit talking to each other and about each other and go out and communicate to the world that we may be fewer in numbers than we’ve ever been but we carry the message they’re waiting for. We must go forth from here united, determined, and what a great general said a few years ago is true, “There is no substitute for victory.”

Observers said that as Reagan was speaking, the hall went completely silent; you could hear a pin drop, and by the time it was over there wasn’t a dry eye in the house. News reporters at the time described a stunned reaction on the convention floor as if many delegates were asking themselves whether they had just nominated the wrong man.

(Side note: It was later reported that Reagan’s daughter Maureen, having come home from the emotional turmoil of the convention, said she had basically cried for two days straight. Consoling his grown daughter, the then-future president is reported to have said to her what he could have said to so many others all over the country: “Have you stopped crying yet?” It was time to turn the page and look to the future.)

But overall, at that moment in time 50 years ago this month, Reagan’s 1976 defeat was seen as the end for his political career. That was the conventional wisdom shared by most people, including most Republicans and especially most of the local and national media. Newspapers across the country actually printed the transcript of his Kansas City remarks under the headline “Ronald Reagan’s Farewell.”

Yet that five-minute speech — broadcast live on national television — reintroduced Reagan in a new light to millions of Americans. Far from being an end, it was a launching pad for what was to come.

By Spectator – https://spectator.org/reagan-76-a-campaign-to-remember/

The Trump administration is preparing for what would amount to the largest single mass visa revocation in U.S. history, targeting the business and tourism visas of up to 200,000 foreigners who have applied for or are currently seeking asylum in the United States.

These are nonimmigrant visas. B-1 and especially B-2 tourist visas are the nonimmigrant visas most frequently used and most often taken advantage of by people who later file for asylum after entering the United States legally. They are intended for short-term visitors who are expected to return home after their stay.

According to State Department documents obtained by The Associated Press and two U.S. officials who were not authorized to discuss the plans publicly because the plan is not yet final, the action focuses on B-1 business and B-2 tourism visas issued between 2016 and 2026.

DHS data from the past decade show that roughly 38% of affirmative asylum applicants who reported their entry status arrived on B-1 or B-2 visas, with 32% entering specifically on B-2 tourist visas.

State Department spokesman Tommy Pigott said the department is working with DHS to identify and revoke visas of foreigners who entered as short-term visitors and then filed for asylum. He declined to confirm the 200,000 figure, saying the number remains dynamic and will proceed on a rolling basis.

Under INA § 212(a)(6)(C)(i) (8 U.S.C. § 1182(a)(6)(C)(i)), obtaining a temporary visa by fraud or willful misrepresentation of a material fact provides grounds for revocation. The administration is targeting those misusing the system by treating asylum as a pathway to permanent residency rather than the narrow protection it was designed to provide for people facing genuine persecution.

If implemented as planned, the revocations would not necessarily result in their immediate deportation. Most individuals with pending asylum cases would instead see their status recategorized; they would lose their status as business or tourism travelers but could continue pursuing their asylum claims through the appropriate channels. The precise number of affected visas remains dynamic and is expected to proceed on a rolling basis, with an official announcement anticipated in the coming weeks unless the plan is revised or blocked.

This initiative builds on an already aggressive pace of visa enforcement under President Donald J. Trump’s second term, which began in January 2025.

Earlier this month, the State Department announced it has revoked more than 175,000 visas since January 2025, many linked to criminal convictions or other violations. The proposed action would roughly double that total and marks a significant escalation in efforts to tighten controls on temporary visitors who later seek to remain indefinitely.

Deputy Secretary of State Christopher Landau has described asylum as a loophole used to circumvent immigration law. The number of cases in which people enter on tourist or business visas and then file asylum claims undermines the nonimmigrant visa system, officials have pointed out. Current applicants must already affirm they will not seek asylum and show intent to return home.

Since taking office, President Trump, along with Secretary of State Marco Rubio, has steadily tightened visa rules, including demands for social media histories, costly bonds, bans on certain countries, and crackdowns on birth tourism. These steps form part of a broader effort to curb both illegal entries and the improper use of legal pathways.

The revocation of these visas would terminate the individuals’ prior nonimmigrant status but permit their asylum claims to proceed. Officials indicate the process will be implemented gradually rather than all at once.

On August 24, 2026, the Supreme Court issued an unsigned emergency order allowing the Trump administration to advance key parts of an executive order restricting mail-in voting.

The ruling stayed in a lower-court injunction blocking implementation in 23 mostly Democratic-led states and the District of Columbia, clearing a path ahead of the November midterms.

This is a procedural win for the administration that lets preparatory work proceed while preserving future judicial review once concrete actions are taken.

The stay applied only to the injunction in the states’ lawsuit; a separate nationwide injunction against certain USPS rulemaking, issued by the same judge in a different case, remains in force and was not lifted.

President Donald J. Trump signed Executive Order 14399, “Ensuring Citizenship Verification and Integrity in Federal Elections,” on March 31, 2026.

The executive order directed the Department of Homeland Security to compile state-specific lists of adult U.S. citizens drawn from federal databases. It also ordered the Justice Department to prioritize the prosecution of officials who issue ballots to ineligible voters, and directed the Postal Service to play a role in verifying mail-ballot eligibility by requiring states to submit voter lists and follow new mailing rules. Non-compliant states may face the loss of federal funding.

At the signing, President Trump called the measure “foolproof,” saying it was “about voter integrity; we want to have honest voting in our country.”

Administration lawyers have described the state-specific citizenship lists as imperfect and intended only as supportive data, not binding mandates. Critics and the lower court, however, viewed the overall scheme, especially the U.S. Postal Service’s gatekeeping role, as an improper federalization of elections.

Federal district judge Indira Talwani of Boston, an Obama appointee, earlier blocked the order, finding it overreached federal authority and infringed on states’ traditional election role. The states argued it threatened chaos and improperly federalized elections so close to the midterms.

Public-opinion data cited by the administration shows consistent majority support across party lines for proof-of-citizenship requirements and measures that reduce the risk of noncitizen voting.

The administration said the suit was premature, pointing out that concrete actions had not yet harmed the states and that the order mainly directed federal agencies internally.

In its per curiam opinion the Court’s 6-3 majority agreed the challenge was brought too early. The order itself required or forbade nothing of the states, any injury remained speculative, and the government faced irreparable harm if blocked from preparing for the 2026 elections.

The Court stressed it was not deciding the ultimate legality of any implementing steps, stating the ruling “does not mean that any measure taken by the government to implement the order will necessarily be lawful. On that score, time will tell.”

The three liberal justices dissented. Justices Sotomayor and Kagan, joined in part by Jackson, argued the states had standing based on the “credible threat” of investigations and prosecutions. Jackson warned the ruling “injects additional unknowns into the already fraught pre-election period.”

Approximately 30% of 2024 presidential ballots were cast by mail.

Most Americans support stronger measures and accountability to ensure only eligible citizens vote, and many view requirements like those in the order as a necessary step to strengthen confidence in election integrity. They argue federal databases can help identify potential ineligible voters while states keep primary authority and federal agencies supply supporting data and enforcement priority.

The order rests on the long-standing principle that only U.S. citizens may vote in federal elections, a restriction already in statute and the Constitution. Americans contend the citizenship lists simply put existing law into practice rather than create new restrictions.

Administration lawyers have, understanbly, called this judicial restraint.

Several states have already tightened their own mail-ballot and voter-roll rules; the federal order is seen as reinforcing those efforts. Practical safeguards remain: the lists must draw from Privacy Act-protected federal records, and USPS rulemaking stays subject to a separate nationwide injunction.

Implementation still faces hurdles.

The Postal Service published its final rule around August 21, 2026 (with an immediate effective date once injunctions are cleared, noted in some accounts as around August 26), requiring states to supply lists of mail-ballot recipients at least 60 days before the election; non-compliant states would not have ballots mailed.

Even as legal challenges proceeded, the Department of Homeland Security has continued developing the technical infrastructure for the citizenship lists, and the administration has pressed Congress to enact the SAVE America Act to lock similar requirements into federal law.

Practical feasibility questions persist, including the completeness and accuracy of federal citizenship lists which are limited by Privacy Act constraints and data gaps, state capacity to comply on short notice, and the risk that eligible voters could be affected.

With early voting nearing and Election Day less than three months away, practical timelines may limit the order’s full effect on the 2026 midterms. In a related June 2026 ruling the Court held that states may count mail ballots arriving after Election Day if postmarked on time.

Legal hurdles remain. With the midterms approaching and a separate nationwide injunction still in place against key Postal Service rules, further litigation is expected in the weeks and months ahead.

Trump has repeatedly vowed to end widespread mail-in voting before the midterms and has consistently done everything within his power to ensure free and fair elections.

While Eric Swalwell and his Democratic colleagues spent years pumping the Russia collusion propaganda against President Donald J. Trump and myself on national television, including Swalwell and Schiff’s false two-year claim that I was a Russian intelligence asset, newly released FBI documents reveal they were projecting their own crimes onto innocent Americans.

In fact, it was the Democratic Party that was hiding their own asset story, which involved a Chinese influence operation that used sex, interns, and illegal campaign money to target Swalwell himself.

This all unfolded while James Comey ran the FBI and Jack Smith headed the Justice Department’s Public Integrity Section, the exact office that reviewed and approved key early steps in the case later known as Freshman Fifteen.

The Bureau knew Fang Fang (Christine Fang) was illegally raising money for California Democrats and using sex for political access. After all, her parents were assessed by the Bureau as Ministry of State Security officers.

Still, agents tried to recruit her as a source.

Simultaneously, Swalwell was in a sexual relationship with her. He later admitted to the FBI he had “physical relations” with her on multiple occasions, including one late-night encounter after taking the prescription sleeping drug Ambien, and claimed he barely remembered.

By 2013 he was already joking to friends that his new girlfriend might work for the Chinese CIA. None of it stopped him.

The Bureau’s attempt to recruit Fang as a source failed in March 2014.

Days later agents opened a full public-corruption investigation focused on Fang trading internships in Swalwell’s office for campaign contributions and funneling illegal straw donations. The target was Swalwell.

Nancy Pelosi, then House Minority Leader, placed him on the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence in 2015 and cleared him for top-secret material while the relationship and the fundraising racket were still ongoing and known to the Bureau.

The last physical encounter, by Swalwell’s own account, occurred in March 2015. He received a classified defensive briefing on April 30, 2015, right in the middle of the active counterintelligence and public-corruption investigation.

Senior intelligence officials also delivered defensive briefings to congressional leadership about Chinese targeting of members’ offices. As a ranking member of the Intelligence Committee, Adam Schiff received those warnings.

They still gave Swalwell defensive briefings.

When a foreign intelligence operation targets a politician, the FBI issues a warning. Why was that standard applied here but inverted in the Russia case against Trump and I? The selective enforcement is criminal.

A sitting member of Congress maintained a physical relationship with a suspected Chinese spy whom the FBI believed was linked to the Ministry of State Security, and whose parents were both assessed as MSS officers.

During that period, the same foreign intelligence assest placed interns in his office and routed illegal contributions to his campaign.

Why did the deep state protect Swalwell while launching a full-court press against Trump and myself?

Fang fled to China around May 2015 after agents began interviewing her associates. Swalwell was dropped as a subject in February 2017, and the investigation closed without charges in May 2017.

Agents had evidence of prohibited foreign-national contributions, conduit donations, falsifying records, and acting as an unregistered foreign agent. They cited “national security reasons” and the unlikelihood she would return.

By then Swalwell was a regular on nightly cable news milking the completely false, fabricated Russia collusion narrative, including his reckless claims that I was a Russian intelligence asset. Schiff did the same, amplifying the narrative and publicly defending his later disgraced Democratic colleague’s place on the Intelligence Committee.

Later, Inspector General Michael Horowitz of the Biden DOJ determined that he and Adam Schiff were leaking classified information. A House Ethics review took no action.

While the FBI was still investigating Swalwell’s multi-year relationship with a suspected Ministry of State Security operative, the illegal money she routed to his campaign, and the interns she planted in his office, defensive briefings on that Chinese targeting had already reached Intelligence Committee leadership. Both men sat on the committee and had access to those briefings. The only difference is that Swalwell was sleeping with a foreign intelligence asset.

Yet for years these men, along with their Democratic allies, threw scripted public tantrums in front of the cameras, insisting that Trump’s and my supposed Russian collusion made them national-security threats and relentlessly amplifying a narrative that ultimately collapsed under scrutiny. Millions watched it unfold night after night. Some believed it. Many hated it. All of it turned out to be a fraud.

Those same institutions that soft-pedaled an active, documented Chinese operation against one of their own treated far weaker claims against Trump and I with relentless force.

That is the deep state’s institutional favoritism on full display, not national security.

The declassified files prove the FBI identified a clear counterintelligence and public-corruption risk involving sex, planted interns, and illegal foreign money directed at a sitting member of Congress.

Federal agents investigated it under Director Comey and the Public Integrity Section then headed by Jack Smith, briefed leadership that included Schiff, watched Pelosi place that member on the nation’s most sensitive committee, and then sealed the record.

Instead of taking action, they chose willful blindness.

When the story later became public and Republicans demanded accountability, Pelosi did not merely defend the decision. She dismissed the entire national-security concern with calculated indifference. “I don’t have any concern about Mr. Swalwell,” she declared. “I do think that it is unfortunate that Mr. McCarthy is trying to make an issue of this.”

That public shrug ignored a more serious fact, Pelosi had already placed Swalwell on the Intelligence Committee in 2015 while the relationship and the foreign influence operation were still live. That was not caution or incomplete information. It was deliberate recklessness.

She kept him there anyway. And while shielding a colleague who had been targeted by a suspected Ministry of State Security operative, she and her allies continued to push the Russia narrative against Trump with maximum intensity.

The hypocrisy here is unmistakable. One documented Chinese operation was minimized and protected; a far weaker set of claims against a political opponent was treated as an existential threat.

Schiff later endorsed Swalwell’s 2026 gubernatorial bid. The campaign collapsed in April under separate sexual-misconduct allegations that forced Swalwell to resign from Congress. The China files were released only after Swalwell had already left office.

Instead, the FBI, DOJ, and Democrats took a fabricated story and pushed it relentlessly to cover their own crimes, amplifying an invented hoax that turned innocent American citizens’ lives upside down. That is not just selective enforcement. It is treason.

President Donald J. Trump’s recent prescription drug policy changes, implemented in February 2026, have delivered the steepest annual decline in U.S. prescription drug prices in more than six decades.

Prices fell 3.1% in the year ending July 2026, the largest drop since March 1963, according to Bureau of Labor Statistics Consumer Price Index data.

This is a dramatic reversal from decades of relentless price increases, during which American patients absorbed the bulk of global pharmaceutical research and development costs while other nations paid far less for the same medications.

White House officials attribute the historic decline primarily to President Trump’s Most Favored Nation (MFN) policies and the TrumpRx platform.

Under MFN agreements, 17 of the world’s largest drugmakers, covering roughly 86% of the branded drug market, have committed to aligning U.S. prices with the lowest rates paid by comparable developed countries.

This ends the long-standing practice in which Americans, representing about 4% of the world’s population, generated the majority of global pharmaceutical profits and effectively subsidized cheaper drugs abroad.

TrumpRx, the administration’s direct-to-consumer website launched in February 2026, has already delivered more than $700 million to patients.

The bulk of these reductions come from GLP-1 medications for diabetes and weight loss, which once exceeded $1,000 per month and now start as low as $149. Insulin, inhalers, fertility treatments, cholesterol drugs, and dozens of other costly medicines have also seen cuts of 50 to 90% or more for cash-paying customers.

Prescription prices are also down 3.9% since President Trump took office and have fallen every single month of 2026. Nonprescription drugs declined 2.4% over the same period, while medical-care commodities overall dropped 2.7%.

The Department of Veterans Affairs alone locked in more than $10 billion this fiscal year, with hundreds of billions projected over the longer term from the full MFN framework.

The United States functioned as the world’s pharmaceutical piggy bank for generations until President Trump took action. Other nations imposed price controls that kept costs near manufacturing levels, allowing them to free-ride on U.S.-funded innovation.

U.S. list prices were three to four times higher than those in many other countries for identical drugs produced in the same facilities.

These cost declines show just how quickly the TrumpRx website, launched in February 2026, and the subsequent MFN deals have delivered real, large-scale results, all in less than six months.

Pharmaceutical drug prices have long been known to fluctuate, since this implementation prices have not risen in any month this year; an unusually sustained stretch of deflation in a category that had climbed roughly three times faster than overall inflation since 1985.

The shift carries broader implications for the global pharmaceutical market. By forcing greater price equity, the United States is reducing the incentive for foreign free-riding and potentially encouraging other countries to pay their fair share.

Early projections suggest tens or hundreds of billions in cumulative U.S. gains. Families are already feeling relief at the pharmacy counter.

The Trump administration remains firmly committed to putting Americans first and delivering lasting prescription drug relief for years to come.

The CPI’s historic 3.1% drop is a direct result of TrumpRx and this administration’s commitment to delivering the lower costs the American people deserve.

Combined with real-world discounts on life-changing medications, the era of the United States serving as the world’s default high-price market is ending under President Trump’s watch.

According to Schmidt, there is nothing wrong with the Russia collusion narrative at all—it just hasn’t been proven yet.

The Trump Administration has been declassifying documents related to the various Russia collusion probes of Donald Trump. Recently, the White House published the FBI’s opening and closing memos for Oxferd Comma, an investigation launched in May 2017 to examine Trump’s Russia ties and his possible obstruction of previous investigations. The disclosures indicate that rogue FBI agents opened the investigation with flimsy predication to get revenge for Trump’s firing of FBI Director Jim Comey a week earlier.

This poses a problem for disciples of the Trump-Russia collusion theory, who needed someone to do damage control, downplay the revelations, and create an alternative media narrative.

That’s where the New York Times’ Michael Schmidt stepped in. Having parlayed the Russia collusion narrative into national prominence, including a book deal and an MSNBC contributor gig, Schmidt’s credibility is on the line when the collusion narrative weakens. So he penned a story that cites the Oxferd Comma revelations to make the startling argument that Trump-Russia collusion has not been investigated enough.

Schmidt was among the Times’ top writers on Trump-Russia collusion, authoring or co-authoring dozens of stories on the topic. He wrote or co-wrote some of the Times’ seminal Trump-Russia pieces, and his work featured among the Times and Washington Post collusion stories awarded the 2018 Pulitzer Prize in national reporting. The issue was so crucial to the Times that its executive editor, Dean Baquet, once revealed that the paper built up its entire newsroom around this single story.

Schmidt’s collusion stories rely extremely heavily on anonymous sources. Trump and his associates’ alleged malfeasance is regularly conveyed by “two people with knowledge of the episode,” “four people told of the matter,”“former law enforcement officials and others familiar with the investigation,” “two people who have heard his account,” “several people familiar with the discussion,” “four current and former American officials,” “five people familiar with the matter,” and other unknown actors.

Naturally, the risk of depending on unnamed, unaccountable sources is that they may be telling partial truths or outright falsehoods for self-serving or political purposes. Schmidt understands this intimately. In 2015, he co-authored an anonymously sourced story reporting that two inspectors general had asked the Department of Justice to open a criminal investigation of Hillary Clinton due to her use of a private email server. The story collapsed soon after publication, requiring extensive corrections revealing that the IGs had called for neither a criminal investigation nor any probe directly targeting Clinton.

Labeling the article a “mess,” the Times’ public editor, Margaret Sullivan, publicly warned about “the lack of accountability that comes with anonymous sources” and called for Times editors to address their reporters’ “rampant use of anonymous sources” and exercise more caution “before publishing a political blockbuster based on shadowy sources.”

Nevertheless, a few months later Schmidt co-wrote another anonymously sourced piece that crashed and burned. The story accused immigration authorities of having missed red-flag jihadist social media posts by an immigrant from Pakistan who later participated in a terror attack in San Bernardino, killing fourteen people. But it turned out the killer’s public social media posts were actually private messages.

Media outlets widely re-reported the false story before realizing the mistake. The blunder was so severe that the mainstream press blasted the Times, with the Washington Post’s Erik Wemple saying the story “set fire to the news system,” Esquire condemning the Times’ “source pollution,” Mother Jones insisting that Schmidt and one of his coauthors be “considered on probation,” and Salon calling it “an epic reporting fail.” Surveying the damage, Sullivan again decried the Times’ “overuse of unnamed government sources” in a column titled, “Systemic Change Needed After Faulty Times Article.”

Schmidt and the Times editors had little interest in Sullivan’s warnings, judging by their unbridled promotion of anonymous sources to propel the Russia collusion narrative. Fortunately for them, Sullivan left the Times in April 2016, and in an amazing coincidence of timing, the paper announced in May 2017 that it would abolish the entire position of public editor, allowing the bulk of its anonymously sourced Russia collusion reporting to emerge without any public complaints from a pesky internal watchdog.

With that history in mind, let’s look at Schmidt’s recent piece. Based on the recently declassified Oxferd Comma documents and interviews with an unspecified number of unnamed former federal law enforcement officials, Schmidt’s story begins with some throat-clearing to set the narrative:

For the last year, the Trump administration’s efforts to seek retribution against intelligence officials and FBI agents who investigated Russia’s 2016 election meddling have been spearheaded by federal prosecutors in South Florida trying to build a criminal case.

But in recent weeks, the White House has added a dimension to its push to rewrite the history of the Russia investigation, releasing a trove of previously classified FBI memos that it says back up President Donald Trump’s claims that a so-called deep state was out to get him.

Schmidt frames the Trump Administration’s efforts to declassify Russia collusion-related documents as a push to “seek retribution” and “rewrite the history of the Russia investigation.” It’s as if there was no malfeasance at all in federal Russia collusion investigations, meaning Trump’s declassifications must be solely aimed at retribution.

And in fact, there really isn’t much malfeasance to be found—aside from the conviction of FBI lawyer Kevin Clinesmith for lying about Trump associate Carter Page’s cooperation with U.S. intelligence against Russian spies, FISA Court Presiding Judge Rosemary Collyer declaring that the FBI had misled the court in Page-related submissions, the seventeen major errors and omissions identified by Inspector General Michael Horowitz in the FISA warrants to spy on Page, CIA Director John Brennan’s manipulation of the 2017 Intelligence Community Assessmenton Russian election interference, the FBI assigning informants to spy on Trump Campaign associates, the Peter Strozk/Lisa Page text messages disparaging Trump and his supporters, the improper wiping of phones used by Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s staff, Associate Deputy Attorney General Bruce Ohr’s transmission to the FBI of false allegations by Christopher Steele after the FBI had fired Steele as a source, the employment of Ohr’s wife to dig up dirt on Trump and his family, FBI Director Jim Comey leaking to the press to force the appointment of a special counsel to investigate Trump, Comey orchestrating an ambush interview of Michael Flynn, the FBI’s misuse of a defensive briefing to spy on Flynn, and other transgressions that clearly bore Schmidt.

Schmidt’s dismissive reference to the “so-called deep state” is also noteworthy. It’s hard enough to deny people are working inside the government to sabotage Trump’s agenda when key Russia collusion investigators like Strozk and Page explicitly vowed to stop Trump from being elected, when FBI attorney Kevin Clinesmith responded to Trump’s election by declaring “Viva la resistance,” and when Schmidt’s own newspaper published the iconic, anonymous column, “I Am Part of the Resistance Inside the Trump Administration” (sub-head: “I work for the president but like-minded colleagues and I have vowed to thwart parts of his agenda and his worst inclinations.”)

But Schmidt’s ridicule is even more problematic considering he wrote an entire book praising the very deep state he denies exists. According to the publisher, Donald Trump v. The United States: Inside the Struggle to Stop a President “chronicles the clash between a president and the officials of his own government who tried to stop him.” With a particular focus on Jim Comey and Don McGahn, the book “records the clash between an increasingly emboldened president and those around him, who find themselves trying to thwart the president they had pledged to serve, unsure whether he is acting in the interest of the country, his ego, his family business, or Russia.” This self-refuting argument, denying there is a deep state while extolling its bravery, is a strange habit among Russia collusion reporters.

As in Schmidt’s book, Jim Comey looms large in his collusion reporting. Schmidt has informed us that In a Private Dinner, Trump Demanded Loyalty. Comey Demurred, and Comey Memos Provide Intimate Look Into Trump Presidency, and Comey Defends Trump Campaign Surveillance: ‘I Have Never Thought of That as Spying’, and Comey’s Memos Were a Product of a Culture of Note-Keeping, and Comey Told Sessions: Don’t Leave Me Alone With Trump, and Comey Says Trump Pressured Him to ‘Lift the Cloud’ of Inquiry, among other heroic acts by the former FBI Director.

Unsurprisingly, we learned at a June 2017 congressional hearing that Comey was a source for Schmidt—Comey testified that he’d used a friend as a cut-out to pass one of his memos to a reporter in hopes (successfully, as it turned out) of ginning up pressure to appoint a special counsel to investigate Trump. The resulting New York Times story, Comey Memo Says Trump Asked Him to End Flynn Investigation, appeared under Schmidt’s solo byline.

Thus, it must have been particularly embarrassing for Schmidt when, during that same hearing, Comey denounced one of the pivotal collusion stories Schmidt co-wrote, Trump Campaign Aides Had Repeated Contacts With Russian Intelligence, as being “almost entirely wrong,” and Comey revealed that he’d informed senators of both parties that the story was false. It’s bad enough for a reporter to be denounced at a nationally televised hearing as a purveyor of fake news, but it’s even worse when you’re being condemned by your own source.

In his new piece, Schmidt asserts, “There is little new of substance in the documents, and nothing that fundamentally undercuts the FBI’s rationale for pursuing the Russia investigation.”

Of course, we don’t need new documents to undercut the rationale for the Russia collusion investigation because it’s already been demolished. The rationale was Australian diplomat Alexander Downer telling the FBI that a Trump campaign volunteer, George Papadopoulos, had “suggested” that the Trump campaign had received “some kind of suggestion” from Russia that it could release thousands of emails that would embarrass Hillary Clinton. So there was a suggestion of a suggestion—and this was third-hand information that Papadopoulos heard not from anyone in the Trump campaign, but from a Maltese professor named Joseph Mifsud who, Papadopoulos asserted, claimed he had heard it from unspecified Russian officials.

So, like a kids’ game of Telephone, the chain of custody of this set of suggestions was the following: Unknown Russian officials →Mifsud→Papadopoulos→Downer→FBI. This is what’s commonly known as a rumor. Moreover, Mifsud denied to the FBI that he made this assertion at all. But for Schmidt, this is the unquestionable, unimpeachable basis for the FBI to investigate the campaign of U.S. presidential candidate for colluding with a foreign power.

Schmidt then discusses the recent revelations about the Russia collusion investigation. The probe, Schmidt comments, “was oddly code-named Oxferd Comma.” The FBI misspelling the name of its own investigation is odd, indeed. An inquisitive reporter might wonder whether, in an improper investigation motivated by FBI agents seeking revenge against a president who had just fired their boss, the odd name might reflect an attempt to sabotage Freedom of Information Act requests related to the probe. But Schmidt is satisfied simply to note theinexplicable curiosity and move on.

Without comment, Schmidt lists the remarkably weak justifications for Oxferd Comma cited by the FBI memo opening the investigation, including the Papadopoulos rumor, Trump’s explanation for firing Comey, media reports about Trump’s business ties to Russia, and Trump complaining to Comey about the previous Russia collusion investigation. Among the five listed justifications, the memo’s longest, most detailed justification is that the Trump campaign intervened to soften language in the 2016 Republican National Convention platform related to Ukraine, changing a demand for the provision to Ukraine of “lethal defensive weapons” to a call for rendering “appropriate assistance.”

This was a classic misreported Russia collusion story that illustrates the media-FBI feedback loop that drove much of the collusion narrative. The loop works like this:

1. The New York Times or Washington Post publishes a wildly distorted or outright false collusion story that is uncritically re-reported by hundreds of other media outlets. Often, the story is based on claims by anonymous “officials” or “law enforcement officials” who are probably FBI agents.

2. The FBI or Mueller probe investigates the Trump associates who are alleged to have done something terrible to help Putin.

3. The investigators leak to the media that they’re investigating the matter, creating another wave of media stories.

Indeed, the Oxferd Comma opening memo cites “multiple open source reports” concerning the 2016 RNC platform’s Ukraine language. Far from illustrating Trump’s affinity for Putin, however, the change actually strengthened the platform’s pro-Ukraine plank. After removing a specific commitment to provide defensive weapons to Ukraine, which only appeared in a proposed amendment and not in the platform’s operative language, the amendment’s final, approved language read, “We support maintaining and, if warranted, increasing sanctions, together with our allies, against Russia unless and until Ukraine’s sovereignty and territorial integrity are fully restored. We also support providing appropriate assistance to the armed forces of Ukraine and greater coordination with NATO defense planning.” Astonishingly, this robust commitment to defend Ukraine against Russia, which was far stronger and more specific than the Ukraine planks in the Democratic National Committee’s platform, was cited by the FBI to help justify investigating whether Trump was a Russian agent.

Breezing straight past these inconveniences, Schmidt gets to his main point: Trump-Russia collusion hasn’t been investigated enough. He explains that Oxferd Comma was opened as a dual investigation—a criminal probe of whether Trump obstructed justice by firing Comey and a counterintelligence probe of Trump’s ties to Russia. Schmidt argues, however, that when Mueller took over the probes, Acting Attorney General Rod Rosenstein only allowed Mueller to focus on the criminal prong, not the counterintelligence prong. Therefore, says Schmidt, counterintelligence concerns like Trump’s personal and business ties to Russia, and whether Russia had compromised him, remain unexamined to this day.

Without acknowledging it was, in fact, a counterintelligence investigation, Schmidt waves away the nearly year-long Crossfire Hurricane probe of Russia collusion that preceded Mueller’s appointment, claiming it did not look “directly at Trump’s personal conduct or his ties to Russia.”

The Oxferd Comma counterintelligence investigation is of long-standing interest to Schmidt. He coauthored the January 11, 2019 Times article revealing the probe’s existence (though not its name). Furthermore, his claim that Rosenstein stopped Mueller from running a counterintelligence investigation is nothing new. In August 2020, the Times published an excerpt from his book making that precise argument—which Mueller’s top investigator, Andrew Weissmann, promptly denounced as “wrong.”

Overall, there is hardly any information in Schmidt’s piece, aside from the investigation’s name, that he hadn’t already reported. But Schmidt has a vested interest in defending the narrative around Russia collusion generally and around the Oxferd Comma investigation specifically. So he responded to the revelations of the probe’s weak predication by simply recycling his old narrative.

Since he’s spent years bemoaning the insufficient counterintelligence investigation of Trump’s ties to Russia, it’s worth considering what are the damning indicators that Schmidt believes need to be probed. In his three pieces on this topic, he lists numerous allegations related to Trump’s personal or business ties to Russia raised either by the FBI or Schmidt himself:

• Unverified rumors that the Russian government had compromising material on Trump connected to sexual affairs he purportedly had in Moscow in 1996 and/or 2013.(The Senate Intelligence Committee reported that the committee “did not establish” that such material existed.)

• Trump publicly joking that he hoped Russia finds Hillary Clinton’s missing emails.

• The false reports on the Ukraine language in the 2016 RNC platform.

• Christopher Steele’s discredited allegations that Russian officials were blackmailing and bribing Trump.

• Press reports that Trump did business with Russians

• Trump showing “an openness to Russia” and refusing to criticize Russian aggression (thus elevating disagreement with Trump’s foreign policy into a potential act of treason by Trump.)

• Trump rejecting the intelligence assessment that Russia interfered in the 2016 election to help Trump. (The assessment was debunked by a House Intelligence Committee report showing how CIA Director John Brennan corruptly manufactured this pre-determined conclusion.)

• Trump’s unsuccessful effort to build a Trump Tower in Moscow. (This was investigated by Mueller, who found no criminal conspiracy and did not cite any direct contact between Trump and Russian officials, though Michael Cohen was convicted of making a false statement about the project’s timing.)

Schmidt’s argument relies on his refusal to acknowledge a mountain of evidence refuting all his points while stringing together conspiracy theories, debunked allegations, and clinically paranoid speculation. Schmidt inadvertently captures the delusional mindset of collusion conspiracists in a quote he got from FBI official Andrew McCabe, the instigator of the Oxferd Comma counterintelligence investigation, who described what the probe was meant to discover: “Could the president actually be the point of coordination between the campaign and the Russian government?”

Granted, Comey didn’t sound much more sane when he blurted out, “I don’t know whether the current president of the United States was with prostitutes peeing on each other in Moscow in 2013. It’s possible, but I don’t know.”

Despite the nearly year-long Crossfire Hurricane investigation, the nearly two-year-long Mueller probe, and every major media outlet in America spending almost three years chasing down every preposterous collusion allegation, there’s still no evidence of collusion. Yet according to Schmidt, there is nothing wrong with the Russia collusion narrative at all—it just hasn’t been proven yet.

At this point, Michael Schmidt is a Japanese soldier hiding in the Philippine jungle in 1970, refusing to acknowledge the war was lost. He is a guy standing next to Geraldo as he opens Al Capone’s empty vault, insisting it’s full of invisible treasure. He is an organizer of the Fyre Festival raving about the great concert as malnourished, dehydrated, disheveled concertgoers are being evacuated. He is Kevin Bacon in Animal House, screaming “all is well” as the town descends into chaos around him.

At least that’s what I was told by three officials familiar with the matter.

By – https://lyceumnow.com/real-russiagate-has-never-been-tried/