The pharmaceutical sales business has come a long way since the days when traveling medicine shows toured rural America selling fraudulent patent medicines. For “Stanley’s Snake Oil Liniment,” a medication that gave us the expression “snake oil,” fast-talking hucksters would stand on a horse-drawn wagon and tell the crowd that their simple mixture of turpentine and red pepper was harvested from Chinese water snakes.

To be clear, the Trump administration’s drug purchasing website doesn’t sell phony nostrums. The “TrumpRx” scam is in the premise, not the product. Trump claims that he has negotiated special deals with the drug companies that lower costs for working Americans and has created an easy way to purchase them online. Don’t believe the hype. The prices resemble what the manufacturers were likely to charge anyway, given market pressures, and they were already developing online “direct-to-consumer” channels themselves.

The White House has nevertheless made extravagant claims about TrumpRx in press releases, and in statements from Trump, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Mehmet Oz, and other officials. Visitors to the website are even greeted by a banner that reads, “$700,000,000+ Saved for Americans.” Kennedy didn’t provide any evidence for that figure when pressed by Senator Elizabeth Warren. He almost certainly couldn’t. Many TrumpRx prices were already available elsewhere, often through GoodRx, an already existing drug purchasing portal that serves as a partial “back room” for the website. Other prices are higher than customers are charged in many other Western countries.

TrumpRx is a major boon to the drug industry. It helps drug manufacturers retain their patent-driven market strangleholds. TrumpRx’s “direct-to-consumer” model, like their own, gives them full control of the purchasing relationship and bypasses most external oversight. Meanwhile, they can pretend to negotiate while still reaping exorbitant profits. For GLP-1s, for example, that means charging hundreds of dollars a month for medications that could be manufactured for pennies.

TrumpRx users are often steered toward buying expensive brand-name medications at “negotiated” prices even when cheaper generic alternatives are available through retailers like Costco and Cost Plus. It can also mislead people into paying more for their medications than they would have, since TrumpRx doesn’t accept insurance. For the 85 percent of Americans with some level of drug coverage, its “discounted” price will almost always be higher than what they would otherwise pay. That’s the kind of bait-and-switch you might expect at a Wild West medicine show.

But who would have expected otherwise? The idea that Donald Trump and his Republican Congress would crack down on high drug prices is patently absurd. The drug lobbying group PhRMA has given congressional Republicans more than $42 million in campaign funding since the passage of Citizens United in 2010. PhRMA also donated $1 million to the Trump Inaugural Committee. Eli Lilly, one of two GLP-1 patent holders, donated $500,000. Its GLP-1 medication is for sale on TrumpRx. Hims & Hers, an online drug purchasing portal, gave $1 million. Its products are also available through TrumpRx. So are those of other million-dollar givers to the Trump Inaugural Committee, including Pfizer, Merck, Johnson & Johnson, and Gilead. This is hardly the stuff of which hard bargains are made.

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October 2026 Issue

If TrumpRx is a win for the industry, what does Donald Trump get out of it? Self-branding holds an irresistible allure for the president, of course, but there were other reasons something had to be done. As the second Trump term began, the industry and the president were under intense pressure. Most voters said drug costs were a top concern. Strong majorities (including 89 percent of independents and 77 percent of Republicans) supported government negotiations to lower costs.

The public pressure was intensified by skyrocketing public demand for GLP-1 drugs, but payers were balking at the exorbitant prices charged by their two patent holders for GLP-1s, Eli Lilly and Novo Nordisk. Insurers, including Medicaid programs, were cutting back on coverage, creating a major problem in a country where nearly half the adult population is clinically obese. (See “What You Need to Know About the GLP-1 Economy,” The Nation, August 2026.)

The TrumpRx website is a façade that allows the administration to protect its lucrative relationship with the drug industry while convincing at least some voters that it’s reducing drug prices. (Fifty-nine percent doubted the Trump administration would meaningfully lower drug costs as of March 2026, but those numbers would probably be even worse without at least the pretense that something’s being done.)

The website itself doesn’t make much of a first impression. TrumpRx’s background is a drab beige, the print hard to read, and the purchasing process awkward. The overall experience is a little depressing, like walking through a shopping mall that’s on the verge of bankruptcy. The website was designed and implemented by the “National Design Studio,” a government unit created under Trump’s executive order, “Improving Our Nation Through Better Design.” If this is “better design,” the future will be hell. It’s almost as if the White House didn’t want to make TrumpRx usable—or didn’t care.

But then, the point is not to “save money for Americans.” TrumpRx is built on coziness with Big Pharma, hucksterism, and hostility to the social contract. It’s a phony solution to a real problem, the latest in a long history of American healthcare scams.

The 21st century may have brought us digital snake oil, but it’s snake oil just the same.