Trump is Captured by Big Pharma

Big Pharma, Big Ag, and Bioweapons Contractors Are All Clients of Trump’s Senior Advisor Susie Wiles

Illustration of Donald Trump with Susie Wiles

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Donald Trump’s executive role in advancing COVID era policies is well known. However, as Congressional investigations and new evidence put the spotlight on those policies, the former president is under increasing scrutiny. Nevertheless, he refuses to concede any errors in judgment, admit wrongdoing, or criticize Big Pharma failings (including over COVID).

But this issue is not merely from the past.

Today, one of Trump’s most trusted campaign advisors, Susie Wiles, is the co-chair of Mercury LLC, which is one of the most powerful lobbying firms in the country. Mercury’s Big Pharma clients include Pfizer, Gilead Sciences (maker of remdesivir), Emergent Biosolutions (formerly BioPort, maker of Anthrax vaccines), and the Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunization (GAVI) founded by Bill Gates.

The ties between this cadre of Big Pharma power players and the Trump campaign through the masterminded agency of Wiles was the focus of a recent Kennedy Beacon article by

Liam Sturgess

. Mercury’s executive team includes numerous Big Pharma veterans. 

Sturgess reported:

Mercury’s senior team is […] peppered with pharmaceutical lobbyists and executives. Adina Mincher, director of governmental compliance, worked in sales and marketing for GlaxoSmithKline. Tony Moffett, a Mercury partner, was “the top government affairs executive at The Monsanto Company.” Managing director Tammy Gordon, was director of digital experience for Novavax, promoting its COVID-19 vaccine product “in forty countries” (before running digital communications for Biden’s 2020 campaign in Florida).

It’s not just Big Pharma giants that are clients of Wiles, but a spectrum of powerful corporate interests represented by the woman that Politico calls Trump’s “de facto campaign manager,” unbeknownst to the general public or his MAGA base.

Trump’s call to “drain the swamp” made a great catch phrase on the campaign trail, but the hard truth is that he consistently places money and power above integrity and moral courage. Wiles, a deeply seasoned establishment operative and lobbyist, is now well positioned to further open the floodgates of corruption and aggressive lobbying by the most powerful corporate interests on the planet.

Defense Industry, Big Oil, Big Ag and Chinese Corporate Clients

In addition to Mercury clients mentioned above in Sturgess’s article, industrial food giants Archer Daniels Midland (ADM) and ConAgra are current Big Ag clients, as is Amazon’s Chinese knock-off Alibaba, according to OpenSecrets.

For all these corporate clients, Wiles, through her ties to Mercury, now represents a direct back-door lobby to former President Trump as he raises campaign and legal defense funds, and defines his campaign platform. We know Trump trusts Wiles as she was one of just two staffers he showed classified documents, as originally reported by ABC News.

Wiles has Trump’s ear, which could be used to advance the agendas of Mercury’s deep pocketed corporate clients prior to election day, as well as afterwards should Trump return to Washington. Indeed, her lobbying and privileged position may have already influenced the course of the Trump campaign and agenda. Trump’s recent flip-flop over Ukraine funding after a Mar-A-Lago meeting with Speaker Johnson has raised eyebrows and ire amongst his base. 

It is of interest to note that Mercury’s former clients include Defense contractors BAE, Carlyle Group, General Atomics, Northrop Grumman, Lockheed Martin, and United Technologies as well as the European Center for a Modern Ukraine, the Government of Qatar, HSBC, Exxon Mobil, and Shell, as reported by OpenSecrets.

Politico’s Michael Kruse profiled Wiles, but his 8000-word puff piece oddly ignored the implications of her leadership role at Mercury LLC and did not identify the lobbying firm nor its corporate clients. Honest Media has explored bold, though discredited, attacks made by Politico on independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Yet Kruse adopted a much softer, even friendly, approach to Donald Trump’s candidacy by ignoring his senior advisor’s lobbying role on behalf of Big Pharma, Big Oil, and other deep state actors. Kruse even lauds Wiles, giving her direct credit for Trump’s election chances. 

“She’s a leading reason Trump has every chance to get elected again,” Kruse writes, “The former president is potentially a future president. And that’s because of him. But it’s also because of her.” 

One illustrative story of corruption during COVID involves two of Mercury’s Big Pharma clients, Gilead Sciences and pharmaceutical distributor AmerisourceBergen (now Cencora), as well as the only FDA-approved COVID-19 drug treatment, Gilead’s repurposed but since-discredited remdesivir (now known as Veklury).

Following an aggressive and deceptive government agency-led campaign against Ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine – two much less expensive, but promising COVID-19 treatment alternatives – Gilead got the necessary green light to bring remdesivir to market as the only approved COVID-19 drug treatment in the U.S.

The Gilead approval came with a sweetheart deal for another Mercury client, AmerisourceBergen. According to OpenSecrets, Americsource paid Mercury LLC approximately $660,000 for lobbying services between 2019 and 2022.

In June 2020, the Big Pharma companies secured a unique distribution agreement with the Federal government. The deal saw more than 500,000 treatment courses of remdesivir (which represented +90% of Gilead’s stock of the drug at the time, and were valued at over $3.5 billion) delivered exclusively by Amerisource to American hospitals through September 2020, according to an industry report by Fierce Pharma.

NBC News has since reported that a study of 11,200 people in 30 countries two months later found that "remdesivir has no meaningful effect on mortality or on other important outcomes for patients.” So while positive results were delivered to the bottom lines of both Gilead and Amerisource, the outcomes were far different for COVID victims who were administered an ineffective pharmaceutical drug lobbied for by Mercury. 

Trump Sells Out to Big Pharma and Gets Rolled by His Own Bureaucracy

No one should be surprised in 2024 that Big Pharma has Trump captured. In fact, the industry influenced him as early as 2016, after Wiles, then head of his campaign in Florida, helped deliver the state for Trump.

Following his election victory in 2016, Trump met that December with Bill Gates, founder of GAVI (a current client of Mercury). At the meeting, Gates discouraged Trump from investigating the “ill effects of vaccines” and declared it a “dead end,” as reported by Chris Hayes for MSNBC’s All-In. That same month Pfizer, a current Mercury client, made a $1 million donation to Trump’s inaugural ball. Trump then met with Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and asked him to lead a Presidential commission on vaccine safety to address “doubts and questions regarding vaccine policy,” as documented by C-SPAN.

A near instant and vociferous backlash from “vaccine experts” followed, as reported by Reuters. Trump spokeswoman Hope Hicks pushed back and said "no decisions have been made at this time" regarding Kennedy’s appointment. Kennedy subsequently had one meeting with Anthony Fauci as well as NIH and CDC officials giving an extensive presentation with Informed Consent Action Network (ICAN) founder Del Bigtree and legal counsel Aaron Siri. Trump ultimately abandoned the vaccine commission idea without public explanation, representing a capitulation to Big Pharma pressure.

Later that year, Trump appointed two Big Pharma-tied executives to head the Department of Health & Human Services (HHS) and the Food & Drug Administration (FDA): Alex Azar, formerly with Eli Lilly, to serve as Secretary of HHS and Scott Gottlieb, formerly with GlaxoSmithKline, to lead the FDA.

In 2019, Gottlieb then left the FDA to join the board of Pfizer, after he facilitated a $1.95 billion contract from Operation Warp Speed to produce 100 million COVID vaccines, according to a Defense Department press release. In 2020, with Gottlieb on Pfizer’s board, the company secured a contract to supply an additional 200 million vaccine doses, as reported by MPR News.

In October 2020, Bloomberg reported on the $18 billion roll-out of Operation Warp Speed (OWS) for which Trump gladly takes full responsibility. Bloomberg revealed that OWS netted Mercury client Emergent BioSolutions $628 million through a no-bid contract. This sum amounted to the largest government payout aside from those made to the vaccine producers themselves.

“It’s a perfect business,” Eli Zupnick, a spokesman for Accountable Pharma (a nonpartisan watchdog group), told Bloomberg of the OWS companies. “Their downside is covered by taxpayers, and their upside is already in their pockets.”

Emergent paid Mercury $320,000 during the Trump administration, under which the company revenue more than doubled from $488 million in 2016 to $1.1 billion in 2019. 

Home Stretch to the 2024 Election

As Election Day approaches, Trump will be advised by Wiles who clearly has the interests of large corporations on her mind far more than those of the American people. If Trump takes Wiles’s interests to Capitol Hill – similar to his recent support of Speaker Johnson and the latest war funding bill – he will not only continue to betray his promise to drain the D.C. swamp. He will also enrage growing numbers of Americans who are demanding an end to the corrupt corporate capture of the federal government and an honest reckoning over Trump’s checkered COVID era record.