What did Donald Trump do today?

He rushed to help exactly one American, a wealthy political supporter, get the health care they needed.

Scott Adams, the conservative culture warrior and creator of the comic strip Dilbert, announced earlier this year that he has been diagnosed with aggressive prostate cancer and is not expected to live long. Adams, who recently said that Black Americans were a "hate group" and that whites should "get the hell away" from them, has been a vocal Trump supporter since 2015. 

That relationship may be why Adams publicly begged Trump to intervene in what he described as the botched administration of a last-chance drug that might extend his life. It is also probably why Trump immediately responded, via HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who told Adams that Trump "wants to help" and would be contacting him.

Where less well-connected Americans are concerned, Trump and Kennedy have slashed funding for cancer research, and medical research in general. Adams, whose net worth is estimated to be in the tens of millions of dollars, probably isn't having financial issues related to his treatment, but 45 million Americans are facing sharp increases in health care premiums due to Trump's refusal to fund ACA subsidies.

Adams described his problem as a logistical issue, not a question of money or access. But this wouldn't be the first time Trump has pulled strings to get someone access to medicines other people can't have: he did it for himself when he nearly died of COVID-19 in 2020. Clinical trials often make exceptions for patients who are truly without hope, but in the case of the brand-new experimental monoclonal antibody therapy Trump helped himself to, it did mean he took a dose that would have gone to someone else. About 60,000 Americans died of COVID before that therapy became available to the general public.

Pluvicto, the drug Adams is seeking access to, was developed at Purdue University from research funded by the National Cancer Institute. Trump's budget, passed this summer, cut the NCI's budget by almost 40%.

Why does this matter?

• Americans have a right to health care whether or not they're wealthy campaign surrogates for the current president. 

• There's cronyism, and then there's picking one person out of tens of millions to have the government help.