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Trump Speaks as Hamas Prepares to Release Last Living U.S. Hostage; Trump Speaks After U.S. and China Announce 90-Day Tariff Truce; Trump Signs Executive Order on Prescription Drug Prices. Aired 10-10:30a ET

Aired May 12, 2025 - 10:00   ET

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.

DONALD TRUMP, U.S. PRESIDENT: A good deal maker, had a special way about him, and it was Steve, knew very little about the subject matter.

[10:00:06]

Who does? But he learned it in about two hours, and he's been fantastic. So, I want to just thank Steve. But they're going to be releasing Edan in about two hours from now or sometime today, let's say. And, again, they thought he was dead just a short while ago. His parents are so happy. They're so happy.

So, as you know, Edan is the only American citizen captured and held hostage by Hamas since October 7th, 2023. And he's coming home to his parents, which is really great news. I mean, to me, it's big news. They thought he was dead. So, that's that.

So, we'll be heading there and we'll be seeing three primary countries. You know all about that, Saudi Arabia, UAE, Qatar, on Thursday's meeting with Russia and Ukraine is very important. I was very insistent that meeting take place. I think good things can come out of that meeting, stop the bloodshed of the horrible -- it's a blood bath. But that 5,000 more, it's really much more, trying to be conservative, more than 5,000 soldiers, Russian. They're not American soldiers. They're from Russia, they're from Ukraine, but they're people, they're human souls, and they're being killed at levels that we haven't seen since the Second World War, and it's every week. A lot of drone fighting. It's a whole new form of warfare and it's violent and vicious.

And so that's it. I'd like to go back to China just for a second. They're very heavy on the fentanyl. We're charging them, as you know, 20 percent for the fact that they send fentanyl into our country. And they've agreed that they're going to stop that. And, you know, they'll be rewarded by not having to pay, you know, hundreds of billions of dollars in tariffs. So, the fentanyl should stop.

It comes from China. It's amazing. And it comes through our southern border. It comes through our northern border too. It comes through Canada and comes through our southern border, more through -- much more through the southern border.

So, that's a very important subject to me, because everybody in this room has lost friends or people that have family members that have died of fentanyl. So, there's a big incentive for China to stop, and I take them at their word. They're going to work on that, I think, very hard. And one thing with, they work on something, they get it done.

So, now I'm about to depart on a historic visit. Some of you are going with us to, as I said, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and United Arab Emirates. Before I do, I'll sign one of the most consequential executive orders in our country's history. I don't think there's ever been anything signed like this, certainly not with respect to healthcare, nothing even close.

I'm delighted to be joined on this occasion by Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who is doing a really good job. I have to tell you that, CMS administrator and a friend of mine, Dr. Mehmet Oz, who is an amazing guy. You know, I was telling Bobby before Oz had a very successful show, but it hurt his reputation, because when you're in show business, it hurts your reputation a little bit. It's good for you, but in terms of professionalism and being a doctor. It sort of hurts your reputation. This guy went to the best schools, was the best, I mean, top, top, top of the line. Then he did a television show, became a success, made a lot of money, all that stuff, but it sort of hurt him.

And, you know who I compare that to? I hate to say this, but a special woman, Jeanine Pirro. She was the toughest, smartest D.A. maybe in our country's, in our city's and state's history, New York. She was really tough, really sharp. Then she did a show and people didn't think of it quite the same way, became more of an entertainment person, like us. Oz is not an entertainer. He's not really an entertainer. You know the real story. And she isn't either. She is unbelievable. She was one of the strongest district attorneys in the history of New York, highly respected, very tough, went after the drug dealers at a level that you don't see today anymore.

And, hopefully, she's going to be -- she's given up a tremendous -- she's leaving the number one show on cable television, one of the number one shows on television, period, The Five. But they've got great people left behind, but she was a big part of it.

[10:05:00]

And so I equated to that. Jeanine Pirro is unbelievable.

FDA Commissioner, Dr. Marty Makary with a reputation that's second to none, and the job he's doing already has been fantastic. Thank you, Marty. And Director of National Institute of Health Jay Bhattacharya, who has been -- as you know, from Stanford, so highly regarded and have all been working with us very hard on this. And the question they would ask being a little bit new to the government aspect of it, is why hasn't -- why doesn't somebody fight the drug price situation, meaning equalization? There's a term, it's called equalization. Nobody wants to mention that term.

And I'm not knocking the drug companies. I'm really more knocking the countries than the drug companies, because they're forced to do things. But the drug lobby is the strongest lobby in this country. They say the drug lobby, it's between that and lawyers and they have a lot of power.

But starting today, the United States will no longer subsidize the healthcare of foreign countries, which is what we were doing. We're subsidizing others healthcare countries where they paid a small fraction of what for the same drug of what we pay many, many times more for. And we'll no longer tolerate profiteering and price gouging from big pharma. But, again, it was really the countries that forced big pharma to do things that, frankly, I'm not sure they really felt comfortable doing.

But they've gotten away with it, these countries. European Union has been brutal, brutal. And the drug companies actually told me stories. It was just brutal how they forced them. And European Union suing all our companies, Apple, Google, Meta. They're suing all of our companies. They end up -- they have judges that are European Union- centric. And they get rewarded $15 billion, $17 billion, $20 billion. And they use that to run their operation. It's not going to happen any longer, that I can tell you.

So, what's been happening is we've been subsidizing other countries throughout the world, not just in Europe, throughout the world. European Union was the most difficult, from what I understand. I mean, I'll tell you a story, a friend of mine who's a businessman, very, very, very top guy. Most of you would've heard of him, a highly neurotic, brilliant businessman, seriously overweight. And he takes the fat shot drug. And he called me up and he said, president -- he calls me -- he used to call me Donald. Now, he calls me president. So, that's nice respect.

But he's a rough guy, smart guy, very successful, very rich. I wouldn't even know how we would know this, but because he has got comments. President, could I ask you a question? What? I'm in London and I just paid for this damn fat drug I take. I said, it's not working. He said, I just paid $88, and in New York, I pay $1,300. What the hell is going on, he said.

So, I checked. And it's the same box made in the same plant by the same company. It's the identical pill that I buy in New York. And here I'm paying $88 in London, in New York, I'm paying $1,300. Now, this is a great businessman, but he's not familiar with this crazy situation that we have. But he was stunned, but it was just one of those stories.

And I brought it up with the drug companies represented by somebody who's very, very smart, good person too. And we argued about it for about half hour and then finally he just said, because they can't justify it. He just said, look, you got me, you got me. I can no longer -- they've been justifying this crap for years. They said, oh, it's research and development. Well, I said, well, research and development, other countries should pay research and development too. It's for their benefit. It was just one of those things.

And the other countries would set a price and they'd meet the price and they'd say, if you don't meet the price, you can't sell it in our country. I said, well, then you walk away and, you know, they'll call you back and they'll sell it in the country, but now they'll have to do that.

So, for the first time in many years, we'll slash the cost of prescription drugs and we will bring fairness to America. Drug prices will come down by much more, really. If you think 59 -- if you think of a drug that is sometimes ten times more expensive, it's much more than the 59 percent. You know, it depends on the way you want to analyze it. But in one way, you could analyze it that way.

[10:10:00]

But between 59 and 80, and I guess even 90 percent.

So, when I worked so hard in the first term, and if I got prices down for a full year, but I'd get them down like 2 percent and I thought it was like a big deal. Well, we're getting them down 60, 70, 80, 90 percent, but actually more than that, if you think about it in the way mathematically.

And pharma has to say, we're sorry, but we'll not be able to do this any longer to these countries that have been so tough. They've been very tough, nasty. It's trade. It's trade. And pharma is also very powerful. And the Democrats have protected pharma.

The Democrats -- this is -- Democrats have protected pharma. These are the Democrats. And, by the way, I just called the speaker of the House and I just called the leader, our leader in the Senate, John Thune, Mike Johnson, spoke to both of them. I said, when you score, you're going to have to score two things. You're going to have to, number one, score that hundreds of billions of dollars of tariff money is coming in. But even bigger than that, you're going to have to score that your cost for Medicaid and Medicare and just basically pharmaceuticals and drugs is going down at a level that nobody has ever seen before. It'll pay for the Golden Dome. I see the Golden Dome is there. See? That'll easily pay for the Golden Dome and we'll have a lot of money left over.

We need the Golden Dome, by the way, in this world, although this world's a lot safer today than it was a week ago and a lot safer than it was six months ago. We had people that had no clue what they were doing.

So, today, Americans spend 70 percent more for prescription drugs than we spent in the year 2000. Think of that. Our country has the highest drug prices anywhere in the world by sometimes a factor of five, six, seven, eight times. It's not like they're slightly higher, that six, seven, eight times, there are even cases of ten times higher. So, that you go ten times more expensive for the same drug, that's big numbers. Even though the United States is home to only 4 percent of the world's population, pharmaceutical companies make more than two thirds of their profits in America. So, think of that with 4 percent of the population. The pharmaceutical companies make most of their money, most of their profits from America. That's not a good thing.

Now, I think, by the way, pharmaceutical, I have great respect for these companies and for the people that run them. I really do. And I think they did one of the greatest jobs in history for their company, convincing people for many years that this was a fair system. Never -- nobody really understood why, but I figured it out. For years, pharmaceutical and drug companies have said that research and development costs were what they are, and for no reason whatsoever, they had to be borne by America alone. Not anymore, they don't.

This means American patients were effectively subsidizing socialist healthcare systems in Germany, in all parts of the European Union. They were the toughest of all. They were nasty. And I see that. I see that with trade too. European Union is in many ways nastier than China, okay? And we've just started with them. Oh, they'll come down a lot. You watch.

We have all the cards. They treated us very unfairly. They sell us 13 million cars. We sell them none. They sell us their agricultural products. We sell them virtually none. They don't take our products. That gives us all the cards, and very unfair. So, they're going to have to pay more for healthcare and we're going to have to pay less. That's all it is.

And believe it or not, you know, because it's really the world we're talking about, not just the European Union, but because it's the world. The numbers are, for the healthcare company, not as bad as you would think. They'll make the same. I think the healthcare companies should make pretty much the same money. I really don't believe they're going to -- they should be affected very much because it's just a redistribution of wealth. It's a redistribution where it could be the same top line, but it's going to be distributed differently. Europe's going to have to pay a little bit more. The rest of the world's going to have to pay a little bit more, and America's going to pay a lot less again, because it's a much smaller population than when you think of the whole world.

So, basically, what we're doing is equalizing. There's a new word that I came up with, which I think is probably the best word, we're going to equalize, where we're all going to pay the same.

[10:15:04]

We're going to pay what Europe's going to pay. We're going to all pay.

Now, there may be some countries in dire need, and I would be willing to sacrifice that and help them. But it's called most favored nation. We are going to pay the lowest price there is in the world. We will get -- whoever is paying the lowest price, that's the price that we're going to get. So, remember that. So, we're no longer paying ten times more than another country. Whoever is paying the lowest price, we will look at that price and we will say, that's the price we're going to pay. Most favored nations, it is what it is.

One breast cancer drug costs Americans over $16,000 per bottle, but the same drug from the same factory manufactured by the same company is one sixth, that price in Australia and one tenth that price in Sweden, one tenth for the identical product. A common asthma drug costs almost $500 here in America, but costs less than $40 in the United Kingdom. So, $40 in the United Kingdom, which is where this gentleman told me he paid a small amount for his shot.

But think of that, so $40 versus $500 here, that's not even better. They're much worse examples than the weight loss drug. Ozempic cost ten times more in the United States than in the rest of the developed world, ten times more. Why? Why? What? What did we do? Suckers, but we never had a president that had the courage to do this. And nobody knew the system like I do. I mean, I've gotten to know this system so well.

And I don't think it's fair that it benefits Obamacare. Obamacare is a failure. It's not a good healthcare. It works -- I made it work. I had an obligation to make it work or an obligation to let it die. I chose that. We had to make it work. I had to make it as good as possible. And I had a choice. I could have let it fail or make it as good as possible. As good as possible means it was still not very good, but it was -- it survived and we did the right thing. But this makes everything work.

And I don't want to have a bad form of healthcare work because of the fact I was able to cut drug prices by 80 or 90 percent. So, we're going to maybe come up with something. I think this gives the Republicans a chance to actually do a healthcare that's much better than Obamacare and for less money, which if you guys would work on that along with Congress.

But I do want to say that Democrats could have done this a long time ago. They have fought like hell for the drug companies and they knew they were doing the wrong thing. And it's going to be very hard. I was just telling the leader and the speaker that how do -- it's going to be very hard for the Democrats to vote against the one big, beautiful deal, the greatest tax cuts in history, greatest everything, but now you have the big drug prices because that's going to be included. It makes that whole situation different from a scoring standpoint. I just told him, I called him up about this. I said, I'm going to do something that's going to be very monumental and you're going to be scoring. You better tell your people that this is going to score really well. And then add hundreds of billions of dollars in tariffs to your list also. But as big as the tariffs are, this is something that really hits quickly.

Five years ago, I signed an executive order to confront this disaster, but only confronted in a minor way. It was a good confrontation, but never to this extent. It took people a little while to understand a very complicated system. But Joe Biden, without any knowledge of what he was doing, terminated the policy and then pretended to negotiate under a new system.

And then you take a look, five out of the ten drugs that he negotiated are now over 200 percent more expensive in America than the rest of the world, and far more expensive than when he even got involved, much more expensive than when he got involved. Joe Biden's plan was, as you know, because you wrote about it, you don't say it very loudly, but it was a very big failure, was his whole presidency.

First, I'm directing the U.S. trade representatives and Department of Commerce to begin investigations into foreign nations that extort drug companies by blocking their products unless they accept bottom line and very low dollar amounts for their product, unfairly shifting the cost burden onto American patients. And we'll be taking a look at that very strongly.

[10:20:01]

The biggest thing we're going to do is we're going to tell those countries, like those represented by the European Union, that they -- you know, that game is up, sorry. And if they want to get cute, then they don't have to sell cars into the United States anymore. It's a very big subject. And they won't get queued (ph) because I'll defend the drug companies from that standpoint.

They were given a price by the European Unions and other countries, this is what you do. This is what we're going to pay. We're not going to pay anymore. Let America pay the difference because it was a big shortfall. Let America pay it. And that's what we did, but we're not doing it anymore.

Next, my administration will secure what we're calling most favored nations drug pricing. The principle is simple. Whatever the lowest price paid for a drug in other developed countries, that is the price that Americans will pay. We're using the term underdeveloped countries, because there are some countries that need some additional help, and that's fine. I think that's very good.

Some prescription drug and pharmaceutical prices will be reduced almost immediately by 50 to 80 to 90 percent. Big pharma will either abide by this principle voluntarily or we'll use the power of the federal government to ensure that we are paying the same price as other countries.

To accelerate these price restrictions and reductions, my administration will also cut out the middlemen. We are going to totally cut out the famous middlemen. Nobody knows who they are, middlemen. I've been hearing the term for 25 years, middlemen. I don't know who they are, but they're rich, that I can tell you. We're going to cut out the middlemen and facilitate the direct sale of drugs at the most favored nation price directly to the American citizen. So, we're cutting out probably the middlemen. It's so important, right? They got to do that.

They get -- they're worse than the drug companies. They don't even make a product and they make a fortune. They're very smart business people, that I can tell you. If companies make no significant progress toward most favored nation, pricing, which we will insist that they do, so I think I'm wasting time talking about it.

We're going to insist upon it and we'll insist and we're going to help the drug companies with the other nations, because those other nations do a lot of trading with us. They need our trade, just like China needed us very badly. They need us just as badly that we will do whatever we have to with trade. Just like we did some great things with trade with India and Pakistan, really helped the situation, very heated situation, could have lost millions of people, more than millions, I mean, many millions of people. And they want to do business with America, but we never used our powers that way. We never knew how. We never had people that knew how to do that.

We'll also open up America's market to safe and legal imports of affordable drugs from other countries, putting dramatic downward pressure on prices. And if necessary, we'll investigate the drug companies and we'll, in particular, investigate the countries that are doing this. And we will add it onto the price that we charge them for doing business in America. In other words, we'll add it on to tariffs if they don't do what is right, which is everybody should equalize, everybody should pay the same price.

And special interests may not like this very much, but the American people will. I mean, I am doing this for the American people. I'm doing this against the most powerful lobby in the world, probably the drug lobby, drug and pharmaceutical lobby. But it's one of the most important orders I think that's ever been signed, certainly with regard to healthcare or health in the history of our country. And it's an honor to be a part of it.

And I'd like to ask Robert F. Kennedy to say a few words, please. Thank you.

ROBERT F. KENNEDY JR., HHS SECRETARY : Thank you, Mr. President. This is this is an extraordinary day. This is an issue that, you know, I grew up in the Democratic Party and every major Democratic leader for 20 years been making this promise to the American people. This was the fulcrum of Bernie Sanders runs for presidency, that he was going to eliminate this discrepancy between Europe and the United States. But as it turns out, none of them were doing, and it's one of these promises that politicians make to their constituents knowing that they'll never have to do it.

And the reason they'll never have to do it is because they know that Congress is controlled in so many ways by the pharmaceutical industry. There's at least one pharmaceutical lobbyist for every congressman, every senator on Capitol Hill, and every member of the Supreme Court. Some estimates, three pharmaceutical companies, the industry itself spends three times what the next largest lobbyist spends on lobbying.

[10:25:01]

So, this was an issue that people talked about, but nobody wanted to do anything because it was radioactive. They knew you couldn't get it by Congress. We now have a president who is a man of his word, who has the courage. President Trump was taking money from the pharmaceutical industry too. I think they gave you a hundred million dollars.

TRUMP: Yes.

KENENDY: But he can't be bought, unlike most of the politicians in this country, and he is standing here for the American people.

I don't know, like, you know, there's writers like Elizabeth Warren or Robert Reich, who are saying that President Trump is on this side of the oligarchs. There has never been a president more willing to stand up to the oligarchs than President Donald Trump. And I'm very, very proud of you, Mr. President, for your courage, I'll say, because I don't want to be crude, your intestinal fortitude, your stiff spine and your willingness to stand up for the American people. We have 4.2 percent of the world's population.

WOLF BLITZER, CNN ANCHOR: All right, we want to welcome our viewers here in the United States and around the world will continue to monitor what they're saying over at the White House.

I'm Wolf Blitzer with Pamela Brown. You're in The Situation Room. And you've been listening and watching the president of the United States speaking just ahead of his first major international trip of this, his second term in office. He's heading to the Middle East. The president is expected to sign an executive order in the coming minutes to reduce prescription drug prices here in the United States. And he touted that surprise breakthrough in the crippling trade war between the U.S. and China.

PAMELA BROWN, CNN ANCHOR: And the two countries have agreed to reduce tariffs on each other's goods drastically for a period of 90 days. The de-escalation though is only temporary. The two economic superpowers plan to meet for ongoing negotiations and both stress the importance of their shared trade. This news has seen global markets soaring. The opening bell rang on Wall Street just over a half hour ago. Look right here, right now, the Dow is firmly in positive territory.

BLITZER: It's almost a thousand points ahead, the Dow Jones Industrial Average right now. We're watching all of this unfold.

Let's go live to our Senior White House Correspondent Kristen Holmes, who's joining us right now. Kristen, the president is touting this deal as a huge, huge win. Update our viewers.

KRISTEN HOLMES, CNN SENIOR WHITE HOUSE CORRESPONDENT: Yes, and for all intents and purposes, it is a huge win for Donald Trump. We know that he had been looking for an off-ramp. We were essentially in a standstill with China after this tit-for-tat escalation led to 145 percent tariff on Chinese goods coming into America, which caused huge problems for businesses and small businesses, essentially all of them feeling like they were looking down the barrel of a gun, and Donald Trump needed a deal.

So, here's exactly what came out of this in terms of the U.S. tariffs on China and Chinese tariffs on the U.S. Both of these countries agreed to come down 115 percent, meaning the U.S. tariffs on China went from 145 percent to just 30 percent. The Chinese tariffs on U.S. products went from 125 percent to just 10 percent.

Donald Trump, as you said, is touting this as a win. And while we had talked to a number of administration officials who had really tried to temper expectations around these conversations over the weekend, Donald Trump himself was looking for a deal. He told me in the Oval Office on Friday that he believed a fair deal would come out of this, and that he had given Scott Bessent, his secretary of treasury a number of how low he could go when negotiating with China, which we obviously or at least assume was 30 percent. But Donald Trump here, he really needed this win as well. As you said, Pamela, you said these words, and this are the key words, the global markets are soaring. He really needed that win when it came to China, despite the fact that he, of course, said that he would maintain these tariffs for a long amount of time.

I do just want to bring up one thing here, guys. One of the things that Donald Trump said just now when he was signing this executive order, which is something we haven't heard since the campaign trail, we certainly don't often hear from Republicans who don't believe this is a winning issue. He said that now he believes that with signing this executive order that they actually have a way to create a healthcare system that's better than Obamacare.

The reason why this, of course, is so striking is because we all remember that moment on this debate stage when Donald Trump told Kamala Harris he had a concept of a plan. Administration officials, then campaign officials, did not have anything in the works because we know that people believe that they rely on Obamacare.

So, now he's opening the door to, again, renegotiate the Affordable Care Act, something that a lot of Republicans really don't want to take on. But he was now saying that this is going to lead to a potential for revamping the healthcare system on top of talking about cutting drug prices.

BROWN: Really important point there.

BLITZER: All right. Kristen Holmes, thank you very, very much. Pamela?

BROWN: And news of the 90 day tariff pause on tariffs has tamped down, at least for now, these growing concerns of a global recession.

[10:30:02]

And that's giving investors around the world a new jolt of optimism.