MAGA-pilled

The Trump White House was basically a giant pill mill, former senior staffers confirm

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Donald Trump wearing a red MAGA hat and yelling at a podium.

Earlier this year, a report from the Department of Defense Inspector General found the Trump White House Medical Unit was basically a pill mill, with powerful prescription drugs handed out with little regard.

On Sunday, Rolling Stone expanded on those findings. New reporting reveals senior administration officials took large quantities of stimulants and sedatives with such regularity, their actions weren’t even viewed as suspicious or unusual.

They were the norm. As one source put it, the Trump White House was ironically the one place where the “war on drugs wasn’t being fought.”

The inquiry into the White House Medical Unit’s freewheeling practices during Trump’s presidency began in 2018, following complaints about improper practices. The 80-page report, which was released in late January, mostly includes findings from 2017-19, the height of Trump’s presidency.

According to investigators, the most popular drug was the stimulant modafinil, which has historically been given to military pilots so they can stay alert during long missions. Sources say administration officials took the drug to fuel their own missions, such as the fallout from Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s probe or the deluge of media requests that followed every White House controversy.

Related:

The Trump White House was fueled by prescription drugs, shocking new report finds

A Department of Defense Inspector General report details rampant prescription drug abuse in the Trump Administration.

“It was kind of like the Wild West. Things were pretty loose. Whatever someone needs, we were going to fill this,” said a source.

On the opposite end of the spectrum, the anti-anxiety medication Xanax was also very popular during the Trump years. Multiple sources told Rolling Stone that senior staffers would routinely down the powerful drug with alcohol–severe health risks be damned.

One former senior administration official captured the prevailing mindset succinctly: “You try working for [Trump] and not chasing pills with alcohol.” 

As the article mentions, the practice of White House doctors and pharmacists providing prescription drugs to staffers, or the president himself, is a decades-long practice. Stimulants are most commonly prescribed during overseas trips to combat jet lag.

Famously, John F. Kennedy reportedly took a wide mix of uppers and downers to fight back pain, while Richard Nixon allegedly took an anti-epileptic drug with some regularity.

Still, the article says prescription drugs were rarely “dispensed as widely” as they were during Trump’s term.

The chief instigator was White House doctor Ronny Jackson, who’s now a MAGA-pilled congressman from Texas. In fact, White House staff called Jackson “candy man,” current and former colleagues told Senate investigators. Jackson withdrew as the nominee to lead the Department of Veteran Affairs when the revelations first came to light in 2018.

The latest Rolling Stone feature says pills were often handed out “without a specific need or diagnosis,” and orders for pills were “written down incorrectly,” if at all. During one reported episode, an aid to Melania Trump walked into the White House Medical Unit and “demanded” Xanax without reason (a source says the aid “stormed out” when her request was declined).

The medical unit’s laissez-faire culture was so widespread, sources say it also impacted private therapy sessions. A former senior administration official said they were warned against divulging personal information during sessions, for fear it could be used against them.

The person says therapists were regularly pressed for insights into patients.

“They’d say, ‘We need you to see this person.’ They’d walk me over there. I’d see this person. Then as soon as I got out, they would ask, ‘Hey what happened?,'” said a source.

When the source rejected those overtures, they said they were “ostracized.”

Ever the projector, Trump routinely accuses his political opponents of drug abuse, including Joe Biden.

“I think there’s probably–possibly–drugs involved,” Trump said about Biden on Fox News during the 2020 election. “That’s what I hear. I mean, there’s possibly drugs. I don’t know how you can go from being so bad where you can’t even get out a sentence … ” (Trump, of course, didn’t finish the sentence himself.)

Trump loyalists also pounced on the Biden Administration last summer, when Secret Service found cocaine in a White House common area.

With Trump all but certain to win the GOP nomination (91 felony charges notwithstanding), the allegedly drug-addled behavior of his staffers comes into fresh focus. Some psychiatric evaluators, such as former CIA profiler Jerrold Post, have said Trump’s “dangerous charisma” can have a drug-like effect on his loyalists, even without the aid of stimulants.

Combining the two–working for Trump and widespread drug abuse–is a scary combination. His first term provided ample proof of that.

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