President Donald Trump visited Ohio and Kentucky Wednesday afternoon on what the media has dubbed his ‘affordability tour,’ where he travels the country advocating for his economic policies ahead of the 2026 midterm elections.
The president’s first stop in Ohio was a manufacturing site for Thermo Fisher Scientific, a leading biopharmaceutical and life sciences company that aids pharmaceutical manufacturers in research, drug development and manufacturing.
Company representatives showed Trump and his team around the plant, joined by Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine, and one woman thanked him for the administration’s efforts at reshoring manufacturing.
“We are actively working with two customers. Merck is one of them, for a key profile product reshoring back to this facility. Boehringer Ingelheim is another,” she said, adding that these opportunities would “nearly double the manufacturing for this facility.”
Mehmet Oz, head of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, accompanied the president on the trip and encouraged him to talk about the most-favored-nation drug pricing deals the administration has secured with many of the world’s leading pharmaceutical companies.
In May, the president signed an executive order aimed at reducing the cost of pharmaceutical drugs in the U.S. by pressuring other countries to pay more for certain medications and by directing certain actions at Health and Human Services, the Federal Trade Commission and the Department of Commerce. Since May, many pharmaceutical companies have agreed to sell some of their products at most-favored-nation pricing to state Medicaid programs and on TrumpRx, a newly established, government-run, online marketplace for direct-to-consumer drugs. The administration has also pushed to get these same companies to sell any “new, innovative medicines” at parity with other developed nations.
“In the end, I used some very strong negotiating talent to get every single country to almost immediately approve. I threatened them with tariffs,” Trump said.
Each of the pharmaceutical companies that has agreed to a deal with the administration has been given a grace-period from tariffs for the rest of the president’s term if they agree to ramp up manufacturing in the U.S.
After Ohio, the president visited the district of Kentucky Rep. Thomas Massie, touring the warehouse of a large third-party logistics company and holding a rally afterward. A banner over the stage read “Lower Prices, Bigger Paychecks.”
The president took the stage to chants of “U-S-A,” saying he loved the Bluegrass State and “won it in a landslide.”
He quickly pivoted to talking about manufacturing and military, with reshoring manufacturing being one of his key stated objectives for his tariff policy. The U.S. Supreme Court recently ruled that some of the president’s tariffs have been unconstitutional, but the administration is seeking to uphold them through other statutory pathways.
“We’re making more and more things in the USA, more than we ever had… And by the way, do we have a great military?”
Trump touted the tax cuts contained in his signature One Big Beautiful Bill, highlighting its “no tax on overtime” provision and saying that many other new tax policies will help create jobs.
“After so many years of politicians who sold out the working men and women of our country, we finally have a president who puts American workers first,” Trump said.
Meanwhile, the president said, Democrats want to raise taxes.
“The midterms are coming. They want to raise your taxes higher than you’ve ever had before… The midterms are going to be very, very important,” Trump said.
Trump also remarked on Operation Epic Fury in Iran, saying it was going well, that the American military was “ahead of schedule” and oil prices would soon be coming down.
“We’ve knocked out their navy, their military, in all its forms. We’ve knocked out just about everything there is, including their leadership,” Trump told reporters.
Regarding the global spike in oil prices, the president said that it was expected and the spike would soon reverse.
“The market’s holding up. I figured we’d be hit a little bit, but we were hit probably less than I thought, and we’ll be back on track in a pretty short while. Prices are coming down very substantially. Oil will be coming down,” Trump said, adding that it would soon come down “more than anybody understands.”
