BREAKING: Trump's FDA Commissioner RESIGNS
What this video covers
The Bulwark’s Jonathan Cohn and Andrew Egger went live the day the news broke to cover Dr. Marty Makary’s resignation as FDA Commissioner. The episode is breaking-news analysis rather than a retrospective: the hosts react to the announcement in real time, place it in the context of Makary’s roughly fourteen-month tenure, and assess what the departure signals for the Trump health agenda.
The Bulwark sits on the center-right, anti-Trump side of the media landscape, so its framing of the resignation is worth reading as the skeptical-conservative take: Makary’s exit as the latest chapter in the administration’s churn at the top of the health agencies. The hosts discuss the resignation as news first, analysis second — the significance of a commissioner leaving barely a year after Senate confirmation.
The hosts opened with a clip of Trump reacting to the news — calling Makary “a great guy” who is “going to lead a good life” — and played it as a firing or resignation that was “not 100% clear” which. They then walk through what Cohn calls the “death of a thousand cuts”: the cross-pressures that kept Makary, in Cohn’s words, caught between factions. On the show’s list: complaints from both sides over drug approval speed; the stalled mifepristone review, with anti-abortion groups calling Makary a “scalp” they had been demanding; reports that the FDA forced its own scientists to withdraw peer-reviewed publications showing vaccines to be safe; and the vaping fight, where career staff had signed off on flavored products and Makary overruled them while the White House sided with the industry. The hosts note Trump had reportedly signed off on Makary’s departure weeks before the news broke.
Key points
- The Bulwark covered Makary’s resignation live on May 12, 2026, with Cohn and Egger reacting as the news broke.
- The hosts frame the exit against Makary’s short, turbulent tenure — confirmed March 2025, gone by May 2026.
- As center-right critics of Trump, the Bulwark’s take represents the establishment-skeptical lens: a resignation as evidence of instability in the health agencies.
- The hosts work through the controversies that boxed Makary in — per the Bulwark’s telling: the stalled mifepristone review, the forced withdrawal of vaccine-safety publications, approval-speed complaints, and the vaping clash where he overruled career staff.
- Reporting discussed on air suggests the vaping fight is what finally got Trump to act on Makary.
- For the chronicle, this is a timestamp on how the resignation played in real time with an anti-Trump conservative audience.