President Donald Trump told an audience of thousands of executives and global leaders at the World Economic Forum that European countries have taken a turn for the worse. Trump said his friends who visit the continent tell him they don’t recognize the region—and “not in a positive way.”
“I love Europe, and I want to see Europe go good,” Trump said on Wednesday at the Davos, Switzerland, meeting. “But it’s not heading in the right direction.”
But the president conceded that Europe is doing one thing better: keeping its drug prices low.
“A pill that costs $10 in London costs $130. Think—it costs $10 in London, costs $130 in New York or in Los Angeles,” he said to murmurs from the crowd.
Europe may not be recognizable to Trump’s friends, but Trump said he has other friends returning from London, remarking on the affordability of medication there. Indeed, a 2024 Rand study found that across all drugs, U.S. customers paid on average 2.78 times higher prices than in 33 other countries, including France, Germany, and the United Kingdom, in 2022.
