Max Variance

The Toll Road: How TrumpRx Built a New Market and Who Owns the Booths

The most important thing happening with TrumpRx has almost nothing to do with drug prices.

On February 5, 2026, the White House launched TrumpRx.gov, a government website listing discounted cash prices on 43 brand-name medications for uninsured and cash-paying Americans.1 The administration called it "the most transformative health care initiative of all time."2 Democrats called it a vanity project laced with conflicts of interest.3 Health economists called it mostly performative.4

All three of these reactions engage with the surface. None of them describe the structural change underneath.

If you want to understand what TrumpRx actually represents, you have to stop asking whether the drug prices are good. The better questions are:

  • Who built this new distribution channel?
  • Who are the intermediaries positioned inside it?
  • Why does the architecture take this specific form?
  • Who gets paid?

The Architecture

TrumpRx does not sell drugs. It does not negotiate prices. It does not dispense anything. It is a referral layer: a government-branded portal that points patients to pharmaceutical companies' own direct-to-consumer websites or provides them with discount coupons powered by GoodRx's pricing infrastructure.5

The "deals" behind the platform are voluntary agreements between the Trump administration and drugmakers like Pfizer, Eli Lilly, and Novo Nordisk. The companies agreed to post discounted prices in exchange for three-year exemptions from pharmaceutical tariffs the administration had threatened.6

Strip away the press conferences and you're looking at the federal government using tariff leverage to create an entirely new distribution channel for pharmaceutical products, then building a website to route patients into it. This channel didn't exist eighteen months ago. Now it does, and the people positioned as intermediaries in it stand to collect revenue on every transaction that flows through.

This is a story about market creation.

The Intermediaries

There's a principle I come back to across industries: the highest-margin, lowest-risk businesses in any ecosystem are usually intermediaries, and they're almost always invisible in public narratives.

The company that moves the freight makes less than the company that brokers the freight. The restaurant makes less than the delivery platform. The drug manufacturer operates on thinner margins than the pharmacy benefit manager sitting between it and the patient.

TrumpRx created demand for a new class of intermediary. If the government is pressuring pharmaceutical companies to sell directly to consumers, someone has to build the infrastructure for those sales. Someone has to create the platforms, process the transactions, integrate the pricing. Two companies are prominently positioned in this role.

GoodRx, a publicly traded company, announced itself as a "key integration partner" at launch.7 It hosts the self-pay pricing for Pfizer's medications, integrates its API with TrumpRx so prices stay current, and provides the coupon infrastructure patients use at pharmacies.8 GoodRx is the visible plumbing of the platform.

BlinkRx occupies a different but complementary position. Its "Operation Access Now" service, launched one week after President Trump sent letters to 17 pharmaceutical companies demanding they set up direct-to-consumer sales channels,9 offers to build turnkey DTC platforms for drugmakers in as little as three weeks.10 BlinkRx doesn't appear on TrumpRx itself, but it builds the destinations that TrumpRx links to.

Both companies are intermediaries inserted into a distribution channel the government called into existence. Their revenue potential scales with the number of pharmaceutical companies that participate and the volume of patients routed through the system. Every new deal the administration signs with a drugmaker expands their addressable market without either company having to do anything.

This is the kind of structural position that, once established, tends to be self-reinforcing. The more pharmaceutical companies build DTC platforms, the more patients get routed to them, the more data flows through the pricing and transaction layer, and the harder it becomes for a competitor to displace the incumbents.

These are emerging chokepoints, positions where value concentrates because the companies sit at a junction that everything else has to pass through. The companies don't need to be doing something uniquely brilliant. They just need to be in the right spot.

Follow the Ownership

Now trace the ownership.

1789 Capital, a venture capital firm based in Palm Beach, Florida, led BlinkRx's $140 million Series D financing round in 2024.11 Donald Trump Jr., a partner at 1789 Capital,12 joined BlinkRx's board of directors in February 2025.13 Three months later, in May, his father signed the executive order directing pharmaceutical manufacturers to offer online direct-to-consumer purchasing options.14 Three months after that, BlinkRx launched "Operation Access Now."9 Three months after that, the administration announced TrumpRx.15

The administration says there was no coordination. BlinkRx's CEO told Congress the company learned about TrumpRx "from press reports."13 The Democrats are focused on whether specific conversations took place between specific people at specific times. That's a narrow legal question about a single moment.

But the coordination question, while politically charged, is structurally beside the point. Look at the architecture: the president signed an executive order creating demand for a new category of pharmaceutical infrastructure. His son's investment firm had already funded one of the companies best positioned to provide that infrastructure. His son sits on that company's board. The policy creates the market. The portfolio company services the market. The fund profits from the market. Whether anyone picked up the phone to coordinate is almost irrelevant to the economic outcome.

This pattern is old. The most durable fortunes in American history were not built by people who found clever deals. They were built by people who shaped the rules, who created the legal, regulatory, and policy environments that made their positions valuable. The railroad barons didn't just build railroads. They bought legislators and manipulated freight rates. The financial families of the twentieth century didn't just invest well. They influenced the regulatory architecture that governed their industries. The mechanism is always the same: political power creates market structure, and connected capital captures the value.

What distinguishes the modern version is its diffusion. 1789 Capital doesn't own BlinkRx outright. It holds a minority stake. Trump Jr. is on the board but isn't the CEO. The fund invests passively and doesn't run the companies in its portfolio.16 This structure is defensive architecture. A minority passive investment is far harder to prosecute as a conflict of interest than direct ownership or operational control would be. The value extraction is spread across enough entities and intermediaries that no single transaction looks damning, even if the overall pattern is unmistakable.

The Access Machine

1789 Capital's growth tells a story that is only partially about investment acumen. In its February 2023 SEC filing, the firm reported raising $10 million, with a target of $100 million over multiple years.17 As recently as November 2024, the Wall Street Journal described the broader MAGA investing movement as one "that hasn't taken off."17 Then Donald Trump won the presidential election. His son joined the firm as a partner. Within a year, assets under management had grown to over $860 million.18 By early 2026, the firm had raised approximately $2 billion.19

The stated investment philosophy is "Entrepreneurship, Innovation, and Growth," or EIG, positioned as a conservative alternative to ESG. The firm says it invests in companies that are "anti-woke" and "America First."20 This is the narrative layer.

The portfolio tells a different story. The largest investments are not in small conservative startups or MAGA-branded consumer products. They are in Cerebras, SpaceX, xAI, Perplexity AI, PsiQuantum, Neuralink21: companies whose primary qualification as "America First" investments is that their founders are politically aligned with the current administration. The firm also holds stakes in defense contractors like Hadrian and Anduril, rare earth companies like Vulcan Elements, and pharmaceutical infrastructure like BlinkRx.22

Between April and November 2025, companies in 1789 Capital's portfolio received more than $70 million in Department of Defense contracts.23 Vulcan Elements, a rare earth magnet company with 30 employees that 1789 invested in during August 2025, received a $620 million loan from the Pentagon's Office of Strategic Capital three months later, the largest loan that office had ever issued.20

The stated motivation, ideological investing in patriotic companies, does not adequately explain this pattern. An alternative explanation does: 1789 Capital is a vehicle for converting political access into financial returns. Trump Jr.'s involvement provides the access asymmetry. It gets the fund into deals it couldn't otherwise reach, attracts capital from investors seeking proximity to the administration, and positions portfolio companies favorably for government contracts and regulatory treatment. The ideological framing is the public narrative. The mechanism underneath is the monetization of access.

Which explanation better predicts the observed behavior? The portfolio's eightfold growth after the election. The pattern of portfolio companies receiving government benefits. The flood of capital from investors. The board seats offered to Trump Jr. by companies seeking favorable treatment.24 These outcomes are consistent with the access-monetization hypothesis. They require substantial special pleading to reconcile with the ideological-investing hypothesis.

What the Critics Are Missing

The Democratic criticism of TrumpRx, while substantively grounded, consistently aims at the wrong target. Congressional letters demand to know whether BlinkRx coordinated with the administration.11 Ethics experts debate whether Trump Jr. should have recused himself from board votes.25 Watchdog groups document the timeline of investments and policy announcements.24 These are all legitimate lines of inquiry, but they share a common limitation: they treat the situation as a collection of discrete events that might constitute corruption, rather than as a system that produces the same outcomes whether or not any individual act crosses a legal line.

The structural reality is that a new market was created by executive action, intermediaries were positioned inside it by connected capital, and the architecture ensures that value flows to people with political relationships regardless of whether any law was broken. The letters to Congress, the narrow legal defenses, the claims of passive investment: these are features of the system, not challenges to it. They are the mechanisms by which the architecture maintains its legitimacy while continuing to function exactly as designed.

The health policy critique is similarly incomplete. Economists are correct that TrumpRx's prices are often no cheaper than what insured patients pay,26 that many of the "discounted" medications were already available at similar prices through existing platforms like GoodRx and Mark Cuban's Cost Plus Drugs,4 and that the platform primarily benefits the roughly 8% of Americans without insurance.27 These are important observations about the drug pricing narrative. But they treat TrumpRx as a policy intervention and evaluate it on policy terms. If you instead treat it as infrastructure, as the creation of a new distribution channel with its own intermediary economics, the question of whether it meaningfully lowers drug prices becomes secondary to the question of what structural positions it creates and who holds them.

The Durability Question

The most important question this situation raises is whether the architecture is durable or brittle. The answer depends on which element you focus on.

The political access that underlies 1789 Capital's position is inherently fragile. It depends on one family remaining in or adjacent to power. The fund's explosive growth was triggered by a single event, the 2024 election, and could contract just as rapidly if political fortunes shift. Access-dependent positions are high-returning but temporally limited, which is why the most sophisticated operators in this space don't stop at access. They use the window of political access to acquire structural positions that persist after the access expires.

This is where BlinkRx becomes interesting as a case study. If BlinkRx establishes itself as a standard infrastructure provider for pharmaceutical DTC platforms, its position could outlast the administration that created demand for its services. Once pharmaceutical companies have built direct-to-consumer channels, they are unlikely to dismantle them regardless of who occupies the White House. The distribution channel, once built, becomes a permanent feature of the pharmaceutical landscape. The intermediaries embedded in it collect revenue indefinitely.

The same logic applies to GoodRx's integration with TrumpRx. If GoodRx's API becomes the standard pricing layer for government-endorsed pharmaceutical platforms, that integration creates switching costs that persist beyond any single administration.

The sophisticated play is not to profit from the political moment. That's the easy part. The sophisticated play is to use the political moment to build infrastructure that generates returns long after the political conditions that created it have changed. Whether 1789 Capital and its portfolio companies are executing this strategy deliberately or simply benefiting from favorable timing is, in a sense, irrelevant. The structural outcome is the same either way.

What This Is Actually About

The TrumpRx story, properly understood, is not about drug prices, corruption, or even one family's financial interests. It is about how political power converts into durable financial architecture in the modern American economy.

The conversion follows a pattern that is centuries old but continually updated in its specifics: executive action creates a new market or regulatory structure. Connected capital, positioned in advance or immediately after, captures the intermediary positions within that structure. The architecture is designed (or at least, it functions) so that value flows to politically connected parties through enough layers of legal separation that no single transaction constitutes an obvious violation. The narrative layer (lowering drug prices, patriotic capitalism, innovation) provides political cover. The mechanism layer (tariff leverage, intermediary positioning, access-driven deal flow) generates the returns.

The people who understand this pattern don't need to coordinate. They don't need to break laws. They don't even need to be unusually clever. They need to be positioned correctly when the architecture gets built, and to hold positions in the intermediary layer where value naturally concentrates as the system scales.

Everyone involved in the TrumpRx debate, the administration, the Democrats, the media, the health economists, is engaged with one layer of the story. The administration promotes the narrative. The Democrats investigate individual transactions. The media covers the conflict of interest. The economists evaluate the policy. None of them are describing the system.

The system is a toll road. The government built it. The question isn't whether the tolls are fair. The question is who owns the booths.

-Ace

References

  1. White House. "Fact Sheet: President Donald J. Trump Launches TrumpRx.gov to Bring Lower Drug Prices to American Patients." February 5, 2026. whitehouse.gov ↩
  2. "Trump launches online prescription drug platform TrumpRx: What to know." The Hill, February 5, 2026. thehill.com ↩
  3. "TrumpRx is launched: How it works and what Democrats say about it." Los Angeles Times, February 7, 2026. latimes.com ↩
  4. "White House launches direct-to-consumer drug site TrumpRx. Here's what to know." CNBC, February 5, 2026. cnbc.com ↩
  5. "What to know about TrumpRx, the Trump administration's prescription drug platform." STAT News, February 5, 2026. statnews.com ↩
  6. "Trump launches discount drug platform: What to know." NBC News, February 5, 2026. nbcnews.com ↩
  7. "GoodRx Powers Pricing for Leading Brand Medications on TrumpRx." GoodRx Investor Relations / Business Wire, February 5, 2026. investors.goodrx.com ↩
  8. "Trump unveils TrumpRx website he says will help Americans buy lower-priced prescription drugs." ABC News, February 5, 2026. abcnews.go.com ↩
  9. Letter from House and Senate Democratic Health Committee Leaders to BlinkRx CEO Geoffrey Chaiken, October 23, 2025. democrats-energycommerce.house.gov (PDF) ↩
  10. "Trump Family Ties Raise Questions In Drug Policy Shakeup." Grand Pinnacle Tribune, October 2025. evrimagaci.org ↩
  11. "Democratic Health Committee Leaders Blast TrumpRx for Ties to Donors and Family & Question Cost Savings." House Energy and Commerce Committee Democrats, October 23, 2025. democrats-energycommerce.house.gov ↩
  12. "Don Trump Jr." 1789 Capital. 1789capital.vc ↩
  13. "Companies see boost from Trump admin after adding Don Jr. to their board." Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW), January 2026. citizensforethics.org ↩
  14. "Federal Update: Trump Administration Announces Deal to Bring Most-Favored-Nation Pricing to GLP-1s." AMCP, 2025. amcp.org ↩
  15. "Trump Announces 'TrumpRx' Site for Discounted Drugs and Deal with Pfizer to Lower Prices." Reported in multiple outlets, September 30, 2025. Referenced in Congressional letter.9 ↩
  16. A spokesperson for 1789 Capital stated: "All of 1789's investments are passive minority positions in private American companies. 1789 has absolutely zero involvement in the operations of the companies they invest in." Quoted in: "Democratic senators sound the alarm on Pentagon backing firms linked to Donald Trump Jr." CNN, January 23, 2026. cnn.com ↩
  17. "1789 Capital Raises $861 Million for MAGA Investments." Law Street Media, September 3, 2025. lawstreetmedia.com ↩
  18. 1789 Capital Management, SEC Form ADV. Filed August 2025. SEC File Number 335007. adviserinfo.sec.gov ↩
  19. "1789 Capital Portfolio Investments, Funds, Exits." CB Insights. Reports the firm had raised approximately $2 billion by early 2026. cbinsights.com ↩
  20. "1789 Capital." Wikipedia. Accessed February 8, 2026. en.wikipedia.org ↩
  21. "1789 Capital, a Trump-linked venture capital fund, has assets of $1 billion." Adapted from Reuters reporting. marinelink.com ↩
  22. "1789 Capital investment portfolio." PitchBook. pitchbook.com ↩
  23. "Democratic senators sound the alarm on Pentagon backing firms linked to Donald Trump Jr." CNN, January 23, 2026. cnn.com ↩
  24. "Companies see boost from Trump admin after adding Don Jr. to their board." CREW, January 2026. citizensforethics.org ↩
  25. "Donald Trump Jr.'s 1789 venture fund poses new conflicts of interest." MSNBC, September 8, 2025. msnbc.com ↩
  26. "Trump launches discount drug platform: What to know." NBC News, February 5, 2026. KFF deputy director Juliette Cubanski stated there is "no clear advantage for most people to use TrumpRx to purchase their medications." nbcnews.com ↩
  27. "White House unveils TrumpRx website for medication discounts." NPR, February 5, 2026. npr.org ↩