Once upon a time, the room revolved around Sean Spicer. On Thursday, it spun right past him

IT’Snot every day that a former White House press secretary finds himself demoted, voluntarily, to the peanut gallery, elbowing for airtime with the rest of us. But last Thursday delivered precisely that plot twist.

There he was: Sean Spicer, Trump’s first press secretary. The man who took a briefing room that once doubled as a federally sanctioned nap pod and turned it into appointment television. Before Spicer, briefings were something a few thousand people snoozed through. With Spicer, they were something millions watched, often with popcorn.

And now? He was one of us.

Sean Spicer, podcast host, author, civilian. Just another credentialed colleague, another raised hand, another hopeful squint toward the lectern.

He took a standing position at the front of the right-hand aisle, and we chatted while waiting for the briefing to begin. He’s just wrapped a book, Trump 2.0, out next month. His thesis was simple: Absence sharpened the blade.

“Had Trump gone back-to-back,” he told me, “the second term wouldn’t have been nearly as consequential. Time out of office lets you think. Analyze. Decide who you want around you, and what you actually want to get done.”

He mentioned a recent visit to Mar-a-Lago, but Trump wasn’t there. They did speak on the phone, though. When I asked for details, he smiled and gave me the most Washington answer imaginable: “We were just catching up.”

We then discussed a moment back in 2020, when Spicer was hosting a show on Newsmax and showed up for a Trump briefing, instantly making history as the first former press secretary to be called on for a question by his old boss.

“Yeah, please, in the back,” the president said, gesturing toward his former spokesman.

It didn’t go unnoticed that POTUS never actually said his name. Still, he got the question.

We took a selfie and I drifted back to my own spot on the other side of the room. Just before the briefing kicked off, Spicer made a move; crossed the room, switched aisles, repositioned himself on the left-hand side directly in front of me. In his hand was a single sheet of notepad paper upon which a handwritten question was scrawled.

Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt took the podium and delivered her opening remarks. Then she scanned the room and called on reporters for a total of 38 minutes. She did not call on her predecessor, who was standing maybe 12 feet away, close enough to read the seal on the lectern. In the end, Spicer didn’t get a question.

As the room cleared, I overheard him quietly auditing his own decision-making to another reporter.

“I shouldn’t have moved spots,” he said. “If I’d stayed on the other side, she would’ve seen me.”

Once upon a time, the room revolved around Sean Spicer. On Thursday, it spun right past him.

TrumpRx Goes Live

The price tags on lifesaving medications have become something between a national frustration and a chronic illness of their own. Everyone is sick of being sick and tired of being billed, no one expects much to change and nothing ever does.

Enter TrumpRx.gov. Unveiled this past week by President Donald J. Trump, the new platform offers a direct path for American patients to purchase some of the most expensive, high-demand prescription medications at the same price paid in other developed countries, often at a fraction of current US rates.

Behind its sleek federal interface lies a sweeping policy experiment rooted in a concept known as Most-Favored-Nation (MFN) pricing, which means that if Pfizer sells a drug to Denmark for $250, that becomes the baseline price for America. For decades, this notion was considered a policy fantasy. It was too legally fraught, too diplomatically messy, too ambitious to operationalize. And the Trump administration has pulled it off.

At its core, TrumpRx.gov is not a new entitlement; it’s neither insurance plan nor social program. It’s not an overhaul of the pharmaceutical industry either. Patients with valid prescriptions simply log on, find their medications from a growing list of 43 (and counting), download a manufacturer-backed coupon, and redeem it at the pharmacy.

Some of the cuts are so dramatic they read like a mistake featured on Dan’s Deals. Ozempic and Wegovy, once priced over $1,000 per month, now range between $149 and $350. Fertility medications that used to cost hundreds per dose are being offered for under $30. Medications are typically available at discounts as high as 80% to 90%.

How did this all come to pass? Rewind to May 2025, when Trump signed an executive order mandating MFN pricing for American patients. In July, the White House mailed what can only be described as “compliance encouragement letters” to pharma CEOs. By September, 16 major manufacturers had signed on to the pricing framework. And then came the kicker: In December, the administration inked a trade deal with the United Kingdom to raise their drug prices by 25%, forcing foreign nations to start picking up their fair share of global R&D costs.

The plan forces American prices down and foreign prices up until equilibrium is achieved. It’s a novel blend of health care policy and trade enforcement, and one that may only have been possible under an administration willing to treat pharmaceutical pricing like a geopolitical negotiation rather than a technocratic reform.

Legal challenges may emerge. There are open questions about how these discounts will interact with insurance plans, and whether the temporary cooperation of drug manufacturers will hold over time. The administration, for its part, is pressing Congress to codify the model through a legislative proposal called the Great Health Care Plan, something that would cement MFN pricing, increase insurance transparency, and potentially reshape private market incentives.

But regardless of the next legislative steps, TrumpRx.gov is live and is already slashing prices on some of the most in-demand drugs in the country. It’s one of the rare moments in American politics when a sitting president promised to lower your out-of-pocket costs and actually launched something that’s tangible, navigable, and unironically helpful.

Information Highway

Arash Aalaei, a congressional reporter for Iran International, showed me something interesting. He was scrolling through live conversations with contacts inside Iran — messages that were getting out despite the regime’s latest Internet blackout. I asked the obvious question: How?

According to Arash, the regime has flooded major cities with vehicles equipped with mobile jamming devices, rolling blackouts on wheels designed to smother any signal trying to escape. So Iranians adapted, as they always do.

People have begun embedding Starlink routers directly into the ceilings of their cars. When they need to communicate with the outside world, they go for a drive. Far beyond the city limits, beyond the reach of the roaming jammers, they pull over, power up, and send their messages to the free world.

In today’s Iran, the road itself has become the Internet.

(Originally featured in Mishpacha, Issue 1099)