US President Donald Trump in the Oval Office with Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy jnr during an event with pharmaceutical companies Eli Lilly and Novo Nordisk last week. Photo / Matt McClain, The Washington Post
A man’s dramatic collapse in the Oval Office and Trump officials’ reactions grabbed public attention, inspired Saturday Night Live and fuelled internet conspiracy theories.
The fallout overshadowed the intended focus of the White House event on new price cuts for weight-loss drugs.
Images of Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy jnr appearing to leave as the man was in crisis, and Donald Trump staring straight ahead as the chaotic scene unfolded behind him, were dissected on cable news segments this weekend and amplified by critics of the United States President.
They do not tell the complete story of a policy-laden event disrupted by a medical emergency, and some of the commentary has been inaccurate.
The man who collapsed was not a pharmaceutical executive, as Saturday Night Live and others have alleged, but a patient who had taken one of the companies’ weight-loss drugs.
Kennedy, by all accounts, was going to get help.
And the photo of Trump staring straight ahead captured a brief moment after the President rose from his chair and pivoted to see others administer aid; he looked away as White House officials ushered everyone from the room.
White House officials have spent days offering their own version of events and have protested at depictions of Trump and his aides as uncaring.
“The Secretary rushed to get medical assistance while others tended to the man, you ghoul,” Kush Desai, a White House spokesman, posted on social media, rebuking one prominent X user who claimed that Kennedy was trying to leave the room “as quickly as possible”.
Dr Mehmet Oz, a physician who serves as a top Trump deputy, immediately stepped in to help the man and cared for him until White House medical personnel arrived. The man swiftly recovered, officials said.
The Oval Office event has drawn scrutiny for other reasons.
Trump was caught on camera appearing to fend off sleep for nearly 20 minutes, a Washington Post analysis found.
California Governor Gavin Newsom (Democrat) dubbed Trump “The Nodfather” online, mocking the President’s seeming struggle to stake awake during the presentation on GLP-1 price cuts.
The White House has denied that Trump was dozing off and suggested questions about the matter were inappropriate.
With public attention focused firmly on the spectacle, the Administration has struggled to keep attention on an underlying policy achievement widely heralded as progress by public health experts.
And the news conference - split into two segments, interrupted by the man’s 10-second collapse and the resulting fallout - has been mostly unhelpful for the White House.
Ahead of the event on Friday NZT, Administration officials had initially hoped the drug-price event would draw mass attention, promising that their upcoming announcement would be “historic”.
The event was part of their campaign to pressure pharmaceutical companies to cut their prices - with Trump demanding near-weekly announcements of every concession by the industry.
Officials were thrilled to tout this as their biggest win yet: a deal with two companies to lower the price of popular weight-loss drugs and expand Medicare access to them.
“It was truly the single most significant announcement relating to drugs, drug pricing in the history of our country,” Medicare official Chris Klomp said on the Fox Business channel.
Outside experts have not gone that far, but credited Trump’s move as a potential tactic to curb the nation’s obesity epidemic and cut health spending. Some Democrats have offered grudging praise.
Both pharmaceutical firms, Novo Nordisk and Eli Lilly, were allowed to have two representatives standing behind the President, shoulder-to-shoulder with senior Trump officials in the Oval Office.
And it was one of those guests - a man in his 60s, invited by Eli Lilly because of his experience taking their GLP-1 drugs, according to three people who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe a sensitive situation - whose collapse, about 30 minutes into the news conference, precipitated a chaotic scramble that has since shaped the news cycle.
Multiple news reports wrongly identified the man as a Novo Nordisk executive, with many prominent social media users basing their conclusion on a LinkedIn headshot. Some accounts and news outlets have yet to retract the false information, which continues to spread.
Much of the cable-news coverage focused on Trump’s own actions. The President’s behaviour as the man collapsed was abhorrent, said Lawrence O’Donnell, an MSNBC host who devoted a 17-minute segment on his show to analysing the moment.
“This image captured Donald Trump’s ability to completely ignore a person in need,” O’Donnell said, comparing Trump to past presidents that he said would have rushed to help.
Fellow MSNBC hosts, CBS late-night host Stephen Colbert and other TV personalities and online pundits have also discussed the Oval Office emergency and circulated the images of Trump and his aides on their platforms - mostly jibing at the White House.
The scene was parodied three times on Saturday Night Live, including in a four-minute segment to start the show that suggested the collapsing man was a medical professional who nearly died “at the mere thought of charging less for drugs”.
“I think I’m playing this very normal: Just stand there and stare like a sociopath,” comedian James Austin Johnson, in the role of Trump, told viewers. “Didn’t even pretend like I was gonna help.”
Oz, Trump’s deputy, has countered that the President personally sought to reassure the man’s anxious wife after reporters left.
“He said, ‘Give me that phone,’ and he talked to her and got her much calmer than I could’ve done,” Oz said in a video clip shared by the Administration. “He’s just a wonderful human being that he would take time.”
The White House has excised the frantic scene from its own channels, removing the original video with the medical emergency and replacing it with a version that elides the moment.
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