05/22/2026
It happened in eight days. And every single step is documented.
April 30: Reynolds American — makers of Vuse v**es — wired $5 million to MAGA Inc., President Trump's super PAC. This brings their total donations to the PAC to $8 million. The transfer was revealed Wednesday night in a campaign finance filing.
May 2: Two days later, a top Reynolds executive and two company lobbyists sat down for lunch with President Trump at his golf club in Jupiter, Florida. Also at the table: two executives from Altria, another major to***co company. At the lunch, they told Trump they were unhappy with how the FDA was regulating their products.
Trump pulled out his phone. He called RFK Jr. and Dr. Oz on the spot — both health officials in his administration — and told them he wanted the flavored v**e restrictions lifted.
May 8: The FDA issued new guidance that would allow major to***co companies to sell flavored v**es in the United States — flavors that had been banned specifically because regulators determined they were designed to appeal to minors. The guidance bypassed the FDA's normal rulemaking process entirely.
Four days later: FDA Commissioner Dr. Marty Makary — who Trump himself appointed — resigned. He told associates he could not in good conscience remain at the agency after it backed such a policy.
The policy Makary quit over opens the door to a $6 billion market in flavored e-cigarettes. The primary consumers of those products? Young Americans. The same young Americans who drove the underage va**ng epidemic that once caused Trump himself, in his first term, to call va**ng a public health crisis that was killing children.
The sequence: $5 million in. Policy out. Eight days.
No congressional hearing. No public comment period. No normal regulatory process. A phone call at a golf club lunch, and it was done.
His own FDA Commissioner walked out the door rather than put his name on it.
Do you think this is corruption — or legal lobbying that just happened to work very fast?
👍 This is textbook pay-to-play corruption — the timeline alone is the evidence
👎 Donations and policy decisions overlap all the time in Washington. Prove a direct link.
