Top MAGA officials had to holler at Donald Trump to keep the president from blabbing to the world about a sensitive government decision he’d made just seconds earlier.
White House aides were left scrambling and shouting to prevent the MAGA leader from leaking details of his plans to reclassify marijuana by posting them to Truth Social toward the end of an Oval Office sit-down with stakeholders two weeks ago, according to a Saturday report by the Wall Street Journal.
“They had to stop him from posting,” Florida Sheriff Gordon Smith, who lobbied for the changes and was present for the meeting, told the newspaper. “I was in awe of the whole thing.”
Smith was part of an effort spearheaded by Trump ally Howard Kessler and Kim Rivers, CEO of major cannabis company Trulieve.
Rivers made sizable donations last year to groups backing Trump’s campaign, hoping to persuade him of the benefits of rescheduling marijuana—particularly for medical research.
After Trump took the White House earlier this year, those efforts encountered pushback from top MAGA officials like House Speaker Johnson, Deputy Chief of Staff James Blair and domestic policy aide Heidi Overton.
The tussle over whether to push ahead with proposals to downgrade marijuana from Schedule I to Schedule III culminated in a two-hour Oval Office meeting.
Toward the tail end of a heated discussion, Trump abruptly announced he’d be siding with the pro-cannabis camp before setting about preparing a Truth Social post on his decision.
“The lawyers and his staff, they started yelling, ‘No sir, you can’t yet; there’s a 30-day period, it’s gotta go through this and that,” Smith recalled.
Trump eventually conceded and asked staffers to go away and draw up an executive order formally certifying the changes, which he later announced on Dec. 18.
The Daily Beast has contacted the White House for comment on this story.
