President Donald Trump went off script at a healthcare press conference to tell a wild story about an overweight billionaire friend who took a weight loss drug and ended up “fatter than ever.”
Bizarrely, the story was supposed to illustrate how expensive the drug—in this case, Ozempic—was in London compared to New York.
Trump said his new prescription drugs initiative would dramatically cut the cost of the waistline-busting pill in the U.S.
He then joked that his wealthy friend didn’t benefit from taking Ozempic because he gained more weight.
Dignitaries at the White House press conference to announce $50 billion extra funding for rural healthcare appeared bemused at the flat punchline.
The president was unperturbed, saying that “people find it funny.”
“A friend of mine, a very smart guy—very, very rich, a very powerful man actually, but he’s very fat and he took the fat drug.
“I won’t tell you which one...it was Ozempic. I won’t tell you that,” he added, to laughs.
The friend went to London on a business trip and called him—he said he used to call him “Donnie”—and told the president: “I have a problem. In New York, I pay $1,300 for this drug.”
“Now this means nothing to him,” Trump rambled on. “This is like a penny out of your wallet. The guy’s worth hundreds of millions, billions of dollars.”
Trump said the friend said he paid just $87 for the same drug in London.
“I knew exactly what he was getting at, because I’ve bothered me for a long time,” he continued. “It was made in the same plant by the same company... so it was too much to bear, because after I told him that the drug does not work on him, because I saw him recently, he’s actually fatter than ever.
“I said the drug is not working on you. You’re going to have to go to something else. But it does work on a lot of people.”
The president concluded the anecdote, “And he said, thanks. You make me feel good. I said, Well, I got to be truthful. You always tell the truth, right?”
Trump said the exchange first alerted him to the different prices paid for prescription drugs abroad and helped him come up with his plan for Americans to pay the same as the cheapest foreign countries.
It’s not the first time Trump has talked about his unnamed friend in public. In May last year, he told Fox News anchor Sean Hannity that the unidentified friend called him afterwards.
“I’m just glad I didn’t use his name,” Trump told Hannity aboard Air Force One. “He’s actually a very rich guy, he’s a very successful guy. He’s very happy, he knows exactly who I was talking about.
“He called, he said, ‘That was interesting.’ He said he was very concerned that I might use his name.”
Trump added that the friend “doesn’t have to worry.”
