When Trump 2.0 assumed office, right-wing wellness influencers believed that the nation was on the verge of a public health glowup. You see, Trump’s health guru, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., promised to Make America Healthy Again. The MAHA movement has since experienced many disappointments, the most recent of which is the Republican-controlled Congress’s approach to corporate servitude.
Bayer, which creates widely used pesticides, has been sued many, many times by consumers who accuse it of manufacturing products that cause cancer. And MAHA activists are now outraged over a recent inclusion in a congressional spending bill that would protect companies like Bayer from meaningful litigation. The New York Times writes:
A provision tucked into a government spending bill could shield Bayer and other pesticides makers from billions of dollars in payouts to plaintiffs. The proposal follows intense lobbying by Bayer and other industry interests over the past year. But it has sparked outrage from a new force in Washington: followers of the “Make America Healthy Again” movement. The controversy highlights tensions within President Trump’s political base over the pesticides in the nation’s food supply.
MAHA influencers apparently thought Republicans would do the right thing and stand up for the little people instead of the faceless corporation. They have since been expressing their outrage online over the GOP’s predictable defense of corporate interests. One of those influencers gave an interview to the Times: “Giving immunity to chemical manufacturers? That’s insanity,” Kelly Ryerson, who goes by “the Glyphosate Girl” on social media. told the newspaper. “And I think that a lot of these Republican congresspeople don’t really even understand what the language means because they’re being sold a bag of goods from Bayer.”
The incredulity from wellness activists points to a broader problem with the MAHA movement: It’s terminally detached from political reality. Wanting America to be a healthier place is certainly a good thing, but it’s unclear why there was ever any expectation that America’s conservative political class was going to make that happen. The GOP has never exactly been a champion of Americans’ well-being. During his first administration, Trump held a White House fast food banquet and staffed his FDA with snack lobbyists. Why would a guy like that ever do anything to lower America’s cholesterol?
MAHA is, at best, ideologically incoherent and, at worst, a stupid movement that serves, functionally, to draw attention and energy away from real efforts to address America’s public health crisis. After all, its figurehead, RFK Jr., is currently busy destroying the agency responsible for preventing Americans from getting deadly viruses.
Kennedy says he wants you to be healthy, so long as you don’t take vaccines or organize to overthrow the for-profit healthcare industry, which is one of the single biggest killers of Americans.
It’s rather difficult to square these facts with the hippy-dippy brand of concern the movement espouses for how corporate America is poisoning us all. Like, yes, pesticides could be a point of concern, but, you know, so is polio. That said, the cognitive dissonance here (which makes the whole MAHA movement feel like a scam) is about what you’d expect from anybody who can take a guy who keeps roadkill in his freezer and bathes in polluted rivers seriously.
Kennedy has made many disastrous and unprecedented policy decisions as head of HHS, including purges of staff and policies that have effectively driven out top leadership at the agency’s pivotal departments (like the CDC, for instance). So, yes, things aren’t looking particularly healthy in America at the moment.
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