Over lunch at his golf club in Jupiter, Florida, on the first Saturday in May, President Trump received a rebuke from a group of tobacco executives and lobbyists unhappy with the way the Food and Drug Administration was regulating their industry.
In the end, Trump heard enough. He interrupted the conversation to call Dr. Marty Makary, the FDA commissioner.
No response.
Furious, the president then called Dr. Makary’s boss, Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., and another top health official, Dr. Mehmet Oz, head of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. He complained to them about the FDA’s regulation of e-cigarettes, according to three people briefed on the meeting who were not authorized to discuss the issue.
The message was received. Less than a week later, executives got what they wanted.
On Friday, the FDA issued new guidelines that could pave the way for major tobacco companies to start selling flavored vaporizers and take a share of the $6 billion e-cigarette market from illegal Chinese competitors. The new policy bypassed the FDA’s regular rulemaking process.
In the intervening week, Dr. Makary continued to argue against the approval of flavored vaporizers as support from Mr. Kennedy and others collapsed around him. Department of Health and Human Services staff have begun drafting the new plan, according to two people familiar with the events.
On Tuesday, Dr. Makary resigned, telling associates that he could not in good conscience remain the head of an agency that supported such a policy.
Although there is no definitive evidence linking the new guidance to donations or lobbying, the episode represented a clear shift in the federal government’s long-held approach to the tobacco industry.
Since the 1990s, when states won big payments and other concessions from major tobacco companies in a nationwide legal settlement, Big Tobacco has been in retreat. Cigarette sales have plummeted and regulations have increased as consumers and administrations of both parties embraced the public health consensus about the dangers of smoking and nicotine addiction.
Initially, the first Trump administration continued the trend, proposing further restrictions on cigarettes and banning flavored vaporizers out of fear that their growing popularity would threaten the health of a generation of teenagers.
But since then, Trump has enthusiastically embraced financial support from the tobacco industry and courted e-cigarette users as a political group.
The new guidance on vaping highlights Trump’s willingness to use his executive authority to prioritize the causes of major corporate donors over public health concerns, taxpayer interests and the judgment of experts, sometimes including those of his own administration.
The president has developed close relationships with tobacco companies, including Altria and Reynolds American, which have donated millions of dollars to his political groups and projects, including his proposed White House ballroom. Its executives attended the luncheon at the president’s golf club.
The Department of Health and Human Services, which oversees the FDA, referred requests for comment to the White House.
White House spokesperson Kush Desai said in a statement that Trump has pushed to expand access to vaporizers to help Americans trying to quit smoking.
“The only guiding factor behind the Trump administration’s health policymaking is the underlying science,” Desai said.
Reynolds American and Altria did not respond to questions about their lobbying or the lunch conversation.
Jeff Raborn, a senior executive at Reynolds, and Phil Park and Todd Walker of Altria attended, according to people familiar with the meeting. Also in attendance were Brian Ballard and Rich Haselwood, lobbyists for the firm Ballard Partners, which represents Reynolds and helped organize a sophisticated and expensive influence campaign that culminated in the new guidance on vaping. Ballard is a top fundraiser for Trump. Haselwood had been an in-house lobbyist at Reynolds before joining Ballard Partners this year.
A spokesman for Ballard Partners declined to comment.
While public health experts consider e-cigarettes to be a less harmful alternative to tobacco-burning cigarettes, the new guidance circumvents a scientific review process that the FDA had previously defended all the way to the Supreme Court. The ignored procedures were intended to ensure approval only of those products that studies show help cigarette smokers transition to vaporizers without attracting a new generation of nicotine users.
The guidance could also allow for higher levels of nicotine in nicotine pouches. It includes a commitment to prioritize efforts to stop the importation of illegal foreign vaporizers, an idea that has bipartisan support in Congress.
Taken together, the policy changes could help companies like Altria and Reynolds gain market share seen as critical to the industry’s survival.
The market for nicotine vaporizers and pouches, like Zyn, encompasses about 30 million people in the United States, on par with the number of cigarette smokers. While the nicotine pouch market is growing rapidly, cigarettes still account for about $50.8 billion, or nearly 70 percent of annual tobacco sales in the United States, according to a Goldman Sachs research report. Sales of e-cigarettes have lagged due to competition from illicit products.
In recent years, the FDA has moved glacially to approve e-cigarettes, authorizing only those with tobacco or menthol flavors, including some sold by Reynolds and Altria. Unapproved Chinese vapes have arrived in the United States, fueling a thriving illicit market with flavors like peach slushie and watermelon ice cream. Last year, industry executives said, illicit fruit-flavored vaporizers accounted for 60 percent of the e-cigarette market.
When Trump made his bid to return to the White House, some in the tobacco industry pulled out all the stops, hoping he would relax regulations on vaping and abandon the Biden administration’s plans to ban menthol cigarettes and crack down on the sale of other cigarettes.
In some ways, Trump is an unlikely savior of the tobacco industry. He has never smoked, but pledged during his 2024 campaign to “save vaping again.”
Through a subsidiary, Reynolds, which is the largest seller of menthol cigarettes, donated $10 million to a super PAC backing Trump’s campaign, according to campaign finance documents. There is no public record of the affiliate donating to groups supporting Biden or former Vice President Kamala Harris’ campaign.
Ballard, whose firm has received more than $4.4 million from Reynolds since early 2017, hosted a dinner for Trump during the campaign with Reynolds executives in New York, according to a person familiar with the interactions. The executives urged Trump to oppose the ban on menthol cigarettes and expressed concern about Chinese vaporizers.
Reynolds executives, including Raborn and Haselwood, were such a presence on the campaign trail that Trump began calling them “my tobacco guys,” according to the person familiar with the interactions and a book co-authored by a New York Times reporter and published last year.
When Trump won, the rest of the industry competed to show their support.
Altria donated $1 million to its inaugural committee; the Steam Technology Association donated $1.25 million; and a Philip Morris affiliate donated $500,000.
On Trump’s second full day in office, his administration withdrew a proposed ban on menthol cigarettes, an initiative that the Biden administration had already largely abandoned. Trump’s team also shelved a Biden-era proposal to sharply restrict nicotine in cigarettes, an effort aimed at speeding the transition away from a product known to be deadly.
Welcoming the rollback of the menthol ban, Altria CEO Billy Gifford told investors on an April 2025 earnings conference call that “we’re hopeful that that activity and that momentum will continue.”
The courtship intensified.
Reynolds contributed another $3 million to another Trump-backed super PAC, while Altria and Juul donated $1 million each.
And Reynolds and Altria each donated to raise private funds to build a new ballroom at the White House. Reynolds’ Raborn and Altria’s Walker were invited to a White House dinner in October for donors who gave $2.5 million or more, as was Ballard.
Tadeu Marroco, chief executive of British American Tobacco, which owns Reynolds American, predicted to investors earlier this year that the Trump administration would clamp down on illegal vapers, saying “the signs the new administration is giving to address that are very encouraging.”
The companies’ lobbying strategy has also reached the states, where they are pushing for the adoption of so-called “registration laws,” of which there are now more than a dozen, including Florida, Virginia and Pennsylvania. Many of those laws restrict the sale of e-cigarettes only to vaporizers on an FDA list.
Guidance published last week said such a list would be created.
Sheryl Gay Stolberg contributed reports.
