Trump vows to 'save vaping'

Former President Donald Trump vowed to “save vaping” after a private meeting with an e-cigarette lobbyist last month.

In contrast, the Trump administration years ago issued several regulations of nicotine products, including vaping.

Tevi Troy, the author of “The Power and the Money,” served as a political appointee at the Department of Health and Human Services under former President George W. Bush and vice president for the e-cigarette company Juul Labs from 2018 to 2020.

The Trump administration raised the age to buy e-cigarettes in conjunction with the vaping industry, which was pushing for the change, Troy says.

“The idea behind these products is that they're supposed to be for adult smokers to be able to switch away from cigarettes, which are a very dangerous device, which kill hundreds of thousands of people,” Troy says.

The Trump administration also limited the sale of flavored vapes.

“There was a lot of lobbying. Lobbying doesn't just come from industry,” Troy says. “There are also public interest groups that were heavily involved in the subject. And there was a bit of a vaping panic in the years 2018 and 2019, which I think has receded a little bit now.”

The number of kids vaping has dropped significantly since 2019.

“I think they put heavy regulatory guardrails on certain products — in some cases, too many — because I had adult smokers who said to me that they couldn't get the products that they needed to get off cigarettes,” Troy says. “But at the same time, I think it was a new product. People didn't know how to deal with it. We've imposed certain regulations and now the system is sorting through it.”

When Troy represented Juul between 2018 and 2020, the industry was concerned with the over-regulation of e-cigarettes.

“It's a careful line you have to walk. You want these products to be available for adult smokers, but at the same time, you don't want kids to be using them because they're not for kids,” Troy says. “There were some voices within the Trump administration that were hypercritical of vaping, but there are others that were trying to accommodate and figure out a way to allow vaping products to be used to help get adult smokers off cigarettes.”

In response to Trump’s statement that he plans to “save vaping,” Troy says the former president means he would continue to allow vaping as an alternative to smoking for adults.

In Troy’s book “The Power and the Money,” he writes about how CEOs can charm and clash with presidents. Some CEOs featured in the book were successful on behalf of their industries, while others were not.

“It's a necessary game in the hyper-regulated world that we live in today, that CEOs need to take into account what Washington is thinking and what Washington is doing,” Troy says. ”The CEO-president relationship is particularly helpful because it's a strong leverage point at which you can have the greatest impact.”

Back in the early 2000s, the tech industry tried to stay away from Washington and focus on innovation in Silicon Valley. But that attitude didn’t last, Troy says.

“Bill Gates thought that Microsoft could just outgrow Washington and not have to worry about it. As he learned in the 1990s, the Clinton administration had other thoughts and they heavily went after Microsoft,” Troy says, “which is why Bill Gates, when he met Mark Zuckerberg, told him, ‘get an office there now,’ there being Washington, D.C., because he didn't want Zuckerberg to make the same mistake that he had. And Facebook has indeed built one of the most powerful and robust lobbying offices in Washington.”