The Trump administration pressured the US Food and Drug Administration to approvefruit-flavoured e-cigarettesas internal polling showed the president's support among young Americans collapsing to its lowest point of his second term.
TheWall Street Journalreported on 5 May 2026 that President Donald Trump rebuked FDA Commissioner Marty Makary over the weekend for failing to move quickly enough on flavoured vaping products, with advisers describing the agency chief as a 'problem for the administration.'
The rebuke came the same day the FDA authorised four fruit-flavoured electronic cigarettes from Los Angeles-based manufacturer Glas Inc., marking the agency's first approval of non-tobacco, non-menthol vaping products in US history. The sequence of events raised immediate questions about whether a scientific regulatory body had bowed to direct presidential pressure for electoral gain.
In September 2024, following a private meeting with a leading vaping industry lobbyist, Trump posted on hisTruth Social platform: 'I saved Flavored Vaping in 2019, and it greatly helped people get off smoking. I raised the age to 21, keeping it away from the kids. I'll save vaping again!' The promise was aimed squarely at a demographic the Trump campaign believed it was winning: young, predominantly male voters who had shifted toward the Republican party by double digits compared to 2020.
That political calculation has since unravelled sharply. AnNBC News Decision Desk Poll powered by SurveyMonkey, conducted from 30 March to 13 April 2026 among 3,009 adults aged 18 to 29, found that 76 per cent of Americans under 30 disapprove ofTrump's job performance, with just 24 per cent approving.
The margin of error for the Gen Z subgroup was plus or minus 2.4 percentage points. The 12-point swing toward disapproval since August 2025 represents the fastest rate of erosion among any age group tracked in the survey.
The polling showed that Gen Z's top concerns were the economy (27 per cent), threats to democracy (19 per cent) and immigration (14 per cent). A fruit-flavoured e-cigarette authorisation, however symbolically significant to the vaping industry, addressed none of those priorities. Sixty per cent of respondents under 30 said they strongly disapproved of Trump's handling of the economy.
According to the Wall Street Journal's reporting, Trump grew frustrated after learning that Makary had declined to authorise blueberry, mango and menthol-flavoured vapes from Glas Inc., a manufacturer that had applied through the premarket tobacco product application (PMTA) pathway.
Advisers told the president that Makary was blocking his vaping agenda and described the commissioner as a 'problem for the administration.' Sources told the Journal that Makary was 'on thin ice.'
The White House publicly denied Makary was at risk. A spokesperson stated that Trump was 'thrilled' with the commissioner's accomplishments. Makary, confirmed by the Senate in March 2025 as the27th FDA commissioner, had reportedly resisted approving fruit-flavoured products out of concern they would appeal to underage users. His position aligned with longstanding FDA policy, which had historically required manufacturers to demonstrate that a product's benefits to adult smokers outweighed any risk of youth uptake.
Source: International Business Times UK
