With his event, Trump wants to draw a contrast to Vice President Harris, who has hardly taken questions from reporters since she replaced President Joe Biden at the top of the Democratic ticket in late July.
Harris has said she plans to give her first official press interview by the end of the month.
Kamala Harris and Joe Biden have announced price reductions for many prescription drugs. (EPA PHOTO)
Trump held a similar press conference last week at his Florida resort, where he spoke for over an hour and criticized Harris on immigration and the economy.
Harris and Biden appeared together on Thursday to announce price cuts for popular Medicare drugs.
U.S. federal agencies have reached agreements with pharmaceutical companies to lower prices on ten of the most popular and expensive Medicare drugs.
The medications include the blood thinners Xarelto and Eliquis and the diabetes medications Jardiance and Januvia.
Medicare spent $50 billion ($75 billion Australian dollars) on the cost of these drugs last year.
This is a milestone for the Medicare program, which provides health insurance to more than 67 million elderly and disabled people in the United States.
More than half of voters in 2020 were over 50, and health care accounts for about 8 percent of the average person’s spending, according to data from the Pew Research Center and the U.S. Department of Labor.
“I have worked my entire career to hold wrongdoers accountable and lower the cost of prescription drugs,” Harris said.
“Medicare can use this (collective bargaining) power to compete on equal terms with the big pharmaceutical companies and negotiate lower drug prices.”
Hours earlier, Trump’s campaign team announced the hiring of five new staff members, including Corey Lewandowski, who served as Trump’s first campaign manager during his successful 2016 campaign.
Lewandowski expressed his enthusiasm about participating in the campaign and posted on X: “Let Trump be Trump!”
It was not immediately clear what these additions would mean for the campaign’s day-to-day operations and hierarchy.
A campaign official, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss internal personnel matters, said the campaign team needed more “soldiers” in the final months of the campaign and that the new hires were not a sign of a broader restructuring.
“Corey Lewandowski, Taylor Budowich, Alex Pfeiffer, Alex Bruesewitz and Tim Murtaugh are all veterans of previous Trump campaigns and their unmatched experience will help President Trump prosecute the case against Kamala Harris and Tim Walz, the most radical campaign team in American history,” Trump’s co-campaign managers Chris LaCivita and Susie Wiles said in a statement.
A campaign official said Trump planned to use Thursday’s press conference to criticize Harris over inflation and the economic situation.
At his campaign rally in North Carolina on Wednesday, the focus was also on the economy, but Trump repeatedly drifted into other topics and attacked Harris personally.
Harris is scheduled to give a speech on economic policy in North Carolina on Friday.
This will involve cost reductions and “price gouging,” said employees and consultants.
Inflation has fallen, but higher prices since the Covid-19 pandemic have hit U.S. consumers.
In the 12 months through July, consumer prices rose 2.9 percent, and prescription drug prices rose by about the same percentage.
with AP
