Slate Magazine69%
Did Donald Trump Use His Office to Get a Powerful New Weight Loss Drug? 74%
By Luke Winkie0%
6/23/2026, 7:23:10 PM
BS Summary: This article contains 33 faulty reasoning types, including Negativity Bias, Availability Heuristic, and Hasty Generalization, with Biased Writer Voice as the most egregious example at 41.6% saturation with 354 hits. Analysis detected 2,814 faulty-reasoning hits from 851 analyzed words, generating a BS Score of 65.9% and a BS Rank of 74% (5,778 of 21,887 articles). This article is worse (more manipulative) than 73.60% of the article peer group.
It could be the Trump scoop of the year, but before we get into anything else, I need to say up front that it remains unconfirmed if the president used his status and government officials to get “compassionate use” access to Eli Lilly’s retatrutide, a powerful anti-obesity medication, which is currently in late-stage trials and unavailable to the public.
That’s the central caveat undergirding a bombshell new report from STAT, which nonetheless insinuates—with the help of three sources and an initial conspicuous nondenial from the White House—that Donald Trump is being administered a heavy-duty drug for a host of serious health problems.
Like everything else with this White House, I doubt we’ll ever get the full story, but if it’s true, I’ve got a lot of questions.
First and foremost, is Trump sick—and how seriously?
Here are the facts, as best we can understand them.
In April—as in, two months before the president’s 80th birthday—a clinician at the National Institutes of Health submitted an unusual “compassionate use” request to the Food and Drug Administration on behalf of a 79-year-old man.
The request was for retatrutide, and it stated that the patient experienced obstructive sleep apnea and pulmonary hypertension—essentially high blood pressure in the lungs, which is no joke and can lead to heart failure.
(Compassionate use is only invoked for people with serious or life-threatening conditions.)
The FDA approved the appeal, and STAT asked the White House if the 79-year-old man in question was, in fact, Donald Trump.
A spokesperson for the Department of Health and Human Services offered what amounted to a no-comment in response: “The FDA supports expanded access programs that can provide patients with serious or life-threatening conditions access to investigational treatments when no comparable or satisfying approved therapies are available,” it said.
“Each request is reviewed on a case-by-case basis based on the clinical circumstances and applicable statutory and regulatory requirements.”
Only after the report came out and sparked a frenzy was there a firm denial:
STAT went on to ask doctors and public health policymakers if they can remember another example of the FDA making a compassionate use exception for a drug that treats a condition as common as obesity.
All of them drew a blank.
The whole thing struck them as extremely odd.
One expert in the article notes that if regulators wanted to expand access to retatrutide, why would they focus on exactly one person?
(“It’s like saying we have all these people who need to get from New York to D.C., and rather than chartering a bus, we’re going to tell everyone that they need to drive their own car,” one said.)
It all leads you to assume that our mystery 79-year-old must be well connected, unscrupulous in his personal dealings, and yes, pretty fat.
Who could it be?
If it is Trump—which we do not know!—it makes one wonder why he’d be so eager for the drug.
True, retatrutide might soon be the most powerful “triple agonist” anti-obesity drug on the market.
Patients in Phase 2 trials shed nearly a third of their total body weight, which is the equivalent of what someone could expect from significantly more invasive bariatric surgeries.
(There is a reason the drug has spurred a chaotic black market.)
It is easy for me to imagine that Trump—image-conscious as he is, and eternally consumed with a fear of death—could have just woken up one morning at yelled at some aide to get him “what many people are saying is the best GLP-1 in history” so he could lose weight “very strongly.”
And considering that denying Trump what he wants is the worst thing anyone in his administration can do to their career, those desires were swiftly fulfilled.
Or, maybe, the original text of the request is serious.
If it is Trump, he is staring down the grim reality of pulmonary hypertension in his 80th year—which, even with treatment, is a progressive disease—and is leveraging all of the resources he has to hold on to his mortality, like Immortan Joe in Mad Max: Fury Road.
(He has not disclosed any such incident.)
If that is the case, then this STAT report is our first real glimpse of what ails the president.
Or maybe this is all a red herring, and the retatrutide is for some other MAGA crony.
Maybe Karoline Leavitt’s husband, who appears to be about 100 years old.
What is clear, though, is that this story isn’t going away.
We will continue to track Trump’s gradual diminishment—and all of his weird bruises and apparent lapses in consciousness—because that is what we’ve been doing for multiple administrations now.
Remember what it was like to have a commander in chief whose vitality wasn’t utterly tenuous?
Can we please get someone in there like that again?
The biggest story in Washington for the past six years has been whether or not one president or another is about to keel over.
Not coincidentally, I think you can say the same thing about the nation as a whole.
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