The MAHA-MAGA Breakup

The political marriage brokered by RFK Jr. was doomed from the get-go. And Republicans may pay a steep electoral price in November.

The People vs the Poison protesters gather at the US Supreme Court. Photo by Tasos Katopodis/Getty Images.

On Monday, hundreds of protesters gathered on the steps of the Supreme Court under a banner reading “The People vs. Poison.” They were there to protest the administration they helped elect.

Inside, the justices were hearing arguments in Monsanto v. Durnell, a case that will determine whether Americans can continue to sue Bayer, which purchased Monsanto, the maker of Roundup weed killer, for failing to warn them that glyphosate may cause cancer. Trump’s Justice Department had filed a brief siding with Bayer, arguing that the EPA has final authority over product warning labels.

The brief follows on a Trump executive order, issued earlier this year, prioritizing the production of glyphosate and declaring the chemical essential to the nation’s farmers and our military. It also requires the U.S. Agriculture Secretary to ensure that no orders, rules or regulations put domestic producers at risk.

It was a hard slap in the face to the Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) movement, which the Trump White House had once courted for votes. Zen Honeycutt, founder of Moms Across America, called it “an egregious offense to what he promised” and “a betrayal.” Kelly Ryerson, known to her followers as “Glyphosate Girl,” was more direct. “Those voters that took a chance on this administration are going to walk,” she declared.

Notably absent from the rally was Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the man who in 2018 won a $289 million verdict against Monsanto on behalf of a cancer patient and who now serves as Health and Human Services Secretary for a White House bent on protecting Bayer’s bottom line. As Rep. Thomas Massie (R-KY) has charged, White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles was paid by Ballard Partners, which lobbied on behalf of Bayer to obtain immunity from lawsuits over glyphosate, leading, he claimed, to the White House executive order shielding the company from suit.

Kennedy’s absence and his silence reflect where MAHA stands, only 15 months into the second term of the regime it helped put in power. How things got to this point—and what it means for the November midterms—is a cautionary tale. It’s about what happens when an anti-establishment movement like MAHA pushes its chips all-in with the new MAGA establishment, and why the health moms were destined to lose that bet from the start.

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Kernels of legitimacy

Years before the movement had a name, the public health concerns that would later coalesce into MAHA were building across American society. They were there in pediatricians’ waiting rooms, in grocery store aisles, and in the private fears of parents watching their children develop worrisome health conditions. Levels of childhood obesity, asthma and food allergies felt new and unfamiliar to many parents and their own childhood experiences. ADHD and autism spectrum disorder diagnoses had risen significantly over recent decades. Parents were reading label ingredients that European regulators had long since restricted or banned. And they were watching a health crisis unfold as doctors liberally prescribed opioids, even while pharmaceutical companies were well aware of the addiction dangers.

Then came COVID. Shifting expert guidance on masks and school closures left millions genuinely bewildered. To be clear, public health authorities were doing what science actually does: updating recommendations as new data emerged from a novel pathogen no one fully understood. That process looks like rigor from inside a laboratory, but it can feel like contradiction or even incompetence to those on the outside.

As the Johns Hopkins Center for a Livable Future noted when MAHA first took shape, there was “cautious curiosity and optimism,” even among mainstream food systems and public health advocates who had spent careers working on pesticide regulation, food industry consolidation and antibiotic overuse in farm animals. They recognized the health concerns, and they were not fringe ones. The American food supply genuinely is more permissive about additives, synthetic dyes and preservatives than that of peer nations. Ultra-processed food genuinely does constitute a disproportionate share of what American children eat, particularly in lower-income households. The pharmaceutical industry genuinely has engaged in documented misconduct. These facts lent the emerging movement emotional authenticity and unusual cross-partisan appeal.

Those who coalesced around these health concerns were not a uniform bloc. They included environmental activists, organic food advocates and a post-COVID cohort that had lost confidence in government health agencies. Most electorally significant were predominantly white suburban and exurban moms who had grown largely skeptical of institutions. They weren’t ideological warriors, but they were genuinely worried about what their children were being exposed to.

As EMBO Reports, the journal of the European Molecular Biology Organization, acknowledged, whatever its later distortions, “at least some of the allure of MAHA reflects a genuine crisis and entirely understandable frustration.” That frustration was real. It was also, as it turned out, exploitable.

The grifter guru

RFK Jr. did not create the health anxieties that characterize MAHA. But he saw them more clearly than almost any other political figure. And he built a career, and ultimately a movement, by becoming their champion.

As an environmental lawyer, he had spent nearly four decades fighting corporate polluters, suing General Electric over Hudson River contamination, taking on factory farms, battling oil and mining giants and earning recognition from Time magazine as one of its Heroes for the Planet. As the longtime chairman and co-founder of Children’s Health Defense, an ironically named organization that has emerged as one of the leading sources of vaccine misinformation online, he positioned himself as the defender parents needed against a captive regulatory system. And as perhaps the most prominent vaccine skeptic in American public life, whose organization’s content during COVID at times circulated more widely on social media than the CDC’s, he gave post-COVID doubters a North Star: a Kennedy, with all the inherited moral authority that name carries, telling them their unease was justified.

But Kennedy didn’t build his health movement on legitimate concerns. He built it on something far more corrosive: motivated skepticism. He began with conclusions and worked backward to “evidence.” His foundational claim that childhood vaccines cause autism, for example, has been studied exhaustively and utterly refuted. The original 1998 study by Dr. Andrew Wakefield that launched the theory was exposed as an elaborate fraud. It had been designed, the British Medical Journal found, to support litigation against vaccine manufacturers, and it was retracted by The Lancet.

The scientific consensus is not merely strong; it is as settled as science gets. But that’s never been enough for Kennedy. Dr. Peter Hotez, a pediatrician, vaccine scientist at Baylor College of Medicine and author of The Deadly Rise of Anti-Science, has documented Kennedy’s rhetorical technique in detail. He found that each time a specific vaccine-autism claim was scientifically refuted, Kennedy simply moved to another, from the MMR vaccine, to the thimerosal preservative, to vaccine spacing, to aluminum adjuvants. Kennedy perpetually shifted the goal posts, while keeping the conclusion fixed. After multiple attempts at private dialogue, Hotez concluded Kennedy was “deeply dug in” and “not interested in the science, or he can’t understand the science, or both.”

This matters enormously for what followed, because Kennedy’s methodology determined the kind of movement he built and the kind of expectations he created. By training his base to treat institutional science as presumptively fraudulent, he cultivated an audience that couldn’t be satisfied by half-measures, governing compromises, or inconvenient data.

In sum, Kennedy had built not just a movement but a set of expectations. After spending years as an outsider teaching his followers to despise the system, he tried to meet those expectations from inside the government as HHS Secretary.

It was never going to fly.

A useful idiot

Kennedy had also, not incidentally, made himself enormously useful to Donald Trump. When Kennedy launched his 2024 independent presidential campaign, he began drawing support from both parties, creating a genuine threat to Biden and a nuisance to Trump. When Kennedy suspended his campaign and endorsed Trump in August 2024, he framed it in the language of shared mission. Trump, he declared, had proven willing to “tackle the chronic disease epidemic, to clean corporate influence out of our government, to unravel the corporate capture of our regulatory agencies.” The arrangement, Kennedy assured his followers, would allow them to “disagree publicly and privately and fiercely if need be” on issues where they differed.

In short, Kennedy suggested to his supporters they could ride the Trump tiger to achieve their goals.

Trump, for his part, played the role with enthusiasm. At a rally in Glendale, Arizona, the same day that Kennedy made his announcement, Trump vowed to launch a commission on chronic health problems and childhood diseases. He invited Kennedy’s supporters to join what he called “a beautiful coalition, in defense of liberty and safety, prosperity and peace.”

Behind the scenes, the transactional logic was intoxicating. MAHA podcast host Alex Clark recalled a backstage moment with Trump in which she told him, “Mr. President, please keep talking about food and pharma; this has a massive impact with undecided female voters.” She called the alliance “the greatest political moment of my life.”

What the merger actually represented, stripped of all ceremony, was the absorption of a genuine populist health movement into a shaky political coalition, held together not by shared values but by loyalty to a leader known for making bold but false promises.

The Tea Party had traveled this road to Trump long before MAHA. That movement entered the Republican orbit after 2010. Initially, alongside its racist undertones against the first Black president, it featured some ideological content: fiscal discipline, constitutional limits and anti-bailout rage. But the Tea Party morphed over the years into something lacking any of this. Its anti-establishment energy was redirected from fighting Republican incumbents to fighting cultural enemies, and its fiscal commitments were abandoned without protest under Trump’s first-term deficits.

What remained was affect without substance; grievance and contempt for institutions, all under a red hat. That phenomenon called itself MAGA, and today it is not so much a platform as a loyalty test. It is a personality cult with political infrastructure.

MAHA was absorbed into that structure in 2024. And Trump’s attitude indicated he had no intention to honor prior commitments. During the campaign, he promised supporters he would give Kennedy an important role in his administration and let him “go wild” on health care. In his victory speech, the framing was warmer but no more substantive, with Trump declaring Kennedy is “going to help make America healthy again. He’s a great guy and he really means it.”

Most revealing was what Trump said about the boundaries he’d drawn. “I told Bobby, ‘I want you to take care of health, I want you to look at the food and the food supply… but let me handle the oil and gas, Bobby.’” As it turned out, Trump really meant he would handle relations with big industry, and the chemicals and pesticides that MAHA cared about most, the ones Kennedy had spent years warning would poison American children, lived on the wrong side of that line.

As STAT News observed on inauguration day, Trump had spent years failing to find the right populist message on healthcare, and Kennedy’s movement had provided the answer. MAHA was a messaging solution, extracted for its electoral value and discarded when its more radical edges became a liability. Author Kurt Andersen, who has written extensively about America’s susceptibility to conspiratorial thinking, argued recently that Trump had essentially reached a cold-eyed conclusion: He had already strip-mined Kennedy’s political value, and now the movement and its anti-vax core had become a liability.

Kennedy, meanwhile, was left to navigate an impossible position. He was the secretary of a department he had spent years calling corrupt, defending a budget he didn’t write, and praising nominees and policies his base despised.

And unsurprisingly, he could not convincingly explain to his supporters why the herbicide he once successfully sued over was now somehow essential to our nation, its security and its food supply.

The first capitulation

In February of this year, President Trump signed an executive order invoking the Defense Production Act to ensure a sufficient domestic supply of glyphosate, the herbicide at the center of Roundup’s decades-long cancer litigation. The order was an unambiguous gift to the agricultural industry. For MAHA, it was a gut punch.

As an environmental attorney, Kennedy was part of the legal team that won a landmark $289 million jury verdict against Monsanto, arguing the company had long known its product caused cancer. As recently as June 2024, when still running for president, he posted on social media that “glyphosate is one of the likely culprits in America’s chronic disease epidemic” and that his USDA would ban its use as a pre-harvest desiccant on wheat. He had built significant MAHA credibility on this issue, naming it repeatedly as one of the chemicals poisoning American children.

Then Trump signed the order, and Kennedy was forced to endorse it. He explained at the time, “Donald Trump’s executive order puts America first where it matters most, our defense readiness and our food supply. We must safeguard America’s national security first, because all of our priorities depend on it.”

The reaction from the MAHA base was volcanic. Ryerson, co-executive director of American Regeneration and a prominent MAHA grassroots voice, said the order “betrays the very MAHA voters who put this administration in power.” Clark, the MAHA podcast host who had called the Kennedy-Trump alliance the greatest political moment of her life, wrote on social media that she was receiving messages from women abandoning the Republican Party. “It feels like MAHA is going through a breakup,” she told the Wall Street Journal. Lawrence Gostin, faculty director of the O’Neill Institute for National and Global Health Law at Georgetown University, put it plainly: “It’s striking how Kennedy is willing to jettison his core values to please Trump. In the process, he is betraying the MAHA movement that he was instrumental in creating.”

Kennedy, to his credit, did not pretend to be happy about it. On Joe Rogan’s podcast, he acknowledged he was “not particularly happy” with the order and said simply: “Pesticides are poison. They’re designed to kill all life.” But he defended Trump anyway, arguing the president had inherited a food system addicted to these chemicals over sixty years of federal agricultural policy. As Molly Olmstead of Slate observed, quitting over glyphosate would mean forfeiting whatever remaining leverage Kennedy had over vaccine policy.

So he stayed, and he swallowed it. The MAHA moms noticed.

The great Medicaid denial

Siding with the pesticide makers wasn’t RFK Jr.’s only betrayal. If the glyphosate episode showed Kennedy capitulating on the environmental promises that animated his movement, the Medicaid fight revealed him defending policies harming the working-class voters MAHA had recruited. Kennedy did so, remarkably, by insisting that something that was plainly happening was not happening at all.

Trump’s “One Big Beautiful Bill,” which passed in 2025, imposed new work requirements on Medicaid recipients. The law was projected to slash Medicaid spending by $840 billion between 2026 and 2035 and reduce enrollment by 11.8 million people by 2035.

Kennedy’s response, delivered repeatedly across multiple congressional hearings this month, was to deny the cuts even exist: “There are no cuts to Medicaid. We are increasing Medicaid spending by 47% over the next ten years. Increasing spending by 47%. How is that a cut? That is only a cut in Washington, D.C.”

Budget experts were quick to explain the sleight of hand. Bobby Kogan, senior director of federal budget policy at the Center for American Progress, told Talking Points Memo that Medicaid spending rises naturally over time due to medical inflation and population growth. “The fact that spending is still rising doesn’t mean there were no cuts,” he said.

One of MAHA’s core constituencies comprises working-class parents worried about their children’s health. They disproportionately rely on Medicaid for coverage. Yet a movement built on the premise that powerful interests had betrayed ordinary Americans’ health now had its champion loudly insisting that losing coverage for nearly 12 million people was, in fact, not even happening.

The muzzle

By early 2026, the White House had seen enough polling to understand that Kennedy’s more radical health positions were becoming a midterm liability. The internal calculation was straightforward: MAHA’s food safety lane played well with persuadable voters, but vaccine skepticism did not. The solution, as STAT News reported, was to put Kennedy on a tight leash, directing him to “stick to the White House’s approved talking points on MAHA ‘wins’ while avoiding politically divisive topics like vaccines” ahead of a planned midterms tour.

The muzzle was evident during Kennedy’s marathon congressional hearings this month. His opening statements to multiple committees focused carefully on nutrition, food dyes and the chronic disease epidemic. The Hill noted that Kennedy “faced a very different political environment from the one in which he appeared before Congress seven months ago, when his MAHA movement seemed to be at its most politically powerful.” CNN put it plainly. The White House sees Kennedy as an asset “so long as he avoids talking about unpopular changes to vaccine policy.” He had been the MAHA movement’s champion, but now was permitted to speak only about the parts approved by the regime.

But a change in CDC leadership made the muzzle on RFK Jr. impossible to ignore. Trump had nominated Dr. Erica Schwartz, a former deputy surgeon general who led vaccination programs throughout her military career, to lead the CDC. For a movement whose central identity had been built on vaccine skepticism, the nomination of a pro-vaccine director was not a minor personnel decision. It was a statement of priorities. In a nod to his boss, Kennedy praised the nomination publicly, thanking Trump and saying he looked forward to working alongside Schwartz to restore the CDC’s “core mission.”

His anti-vax supporters melted down on X. Some wrote to dismiss the entire movement as “just another scam.” Others read Kennedy’s situation with sympathy: “You must be living in a pure nightmare,” one wrote. “Forced to celebrate people who are antithetical to the MAHA movement.”

When Rep. Raul Ruiz (D-CA) asked Kennedy directly during a House hearing whether he would commit to implementing whatever vaccine guidance the new CDC director issued, Kennedy’s answer was unambiguous: “I’m not going to make that kind of commitment.”

In sum, Kennedy had welcomed the pro-vaccine nominee as instructed, but in the next breath would not promise to follow her guidance. It was a position that satisfied exactly nobody. The MAHA base saw capitulation, while the mainstream saw a dangerous ideologue. Kennedy had managed to alienate both audiences.

As the worm turns

Kennedy’s response to 15 months of broken promises, collapsed credibility and a base in open revolt has followed a predictable arc: retreat to safer ground, rebrand as an insurgent, and hope his followers don’t notice that he is now the very government he spent decades denouncing.

None of it has worked. The MAHA voters he recruited with promises of radical systemic change have watched each of those promises collapse, and they are not confused about what happened.

The retreat to safer ground has been the most visible move. Facing a White House that wanted vaccine controversy off the table ahead of the midterms, Kennedy pivoted his public messaging toward the least contentious lane available. STAT News described it as “a cynical, political pause shaped more by electoral timing than public health strategy.” He hit the campaign trail highlighting efforts to eliminate food dyes and overhaul dietary guidelines, with no mention of the shrinking childhood vaccination schedule or the overhauled vaccine advisory committee.

In his congressional testimony this month, Kennedy framed his focus on nutrition, dietary guidelines and food dyes as a way to prevent disease. These are real issues, but they are also the ones Kennedy himself spent years treating as symptoms of a deeper corruption, not the corruption itself.

The MAHA voters who followed him into the Trump coalition didn’t just want clearer cereal box labels. Kennedy had promised to dismantle the pharmaceutical-regulatory complex, take on the chemical companies and restore honesty to federal health agencies. His weak pivot to food dyes is the answer to a question his base isn’t asking.

On preventable diseases like measles, Kennedy’s position became untenable during the hearings. The U.S. is on the brink of losing its measles elimination status, with over 4,000 confirmed cases, the highest levels in a quarter century. Two unvaccinated children died last year, the first measles deaths in a decade. These are the consequences of a decade of vaccine skepticism that Kennedy amplified, monetized and carried into the highest reaches of federal health policy.

His followers trusted him on this to their detriment. They made decisions about their children based on misinformation he had spread. And when pressed under oath about whether the measles vaccine could have saved one of those children’s lives, Kennedy—the nation’s top health official—could only manage, “It’s possible, certainly.”

He can’t really say more than that. To forcefully advocate for the MMR vaccine now would require him to repudiate the movement that made him powerful, acknowledge that the fears he stoked over vaccines were overblown, and concede that the parents who followed his guidance were harmed by his claims. As Bloomberg reported this month, enough of those parents have made a quiet return to vaccines that it is helping to slow the outbreaks. The movement’s own followers are beginning to correct for their leader’s failures.

The moves Kennedy has made to reclaim his outsider status have been revealingly desperate. He announced a podcast (!!) promising to “name the names of the forces that obstruct the paths to public health” and “expose the hypocrisy and the corruption,” even while his own HHS spokesman quietly told reporters it would focus on affordability and topics polling well ahead of the midterms. A man launching a government-branded podcast to expose government corruption has already lost the thread.

The people who paid the price for Kennedy’s ambition are not in the HHS press office. They are the parents who skipped their children’s MMR vaccines on his advice and are now watching outbreaks spread across the Southwest. They are working-class Medicaid enrollees who believed the Kennedy name would help them stand up to powerful interests that had rigged the system against them. They are now watching that same Kennedy shout at hearings that their lost coverage never happened.

They are wellness advocates and organic food moms who thought the MAHA-MAGA merger was the greatest political moment of their lives. They have since learned what movements always learn when they hand their energy to someone else’s machine: that the larger system had other plans, and that their champion’s ambition was never fully aligned to their cause.

Kennedy built his movement by weaponizing legitimate fears, attaching them to pseudoscience, and packaging the result as political power. He was very good at it. What he could not do, it turns out, was govern on any of it. The transaction he made to get into government required him to subordinate all of it to Dear Leader, whose priorities were always elsewhere.

November is coming

The electoral stakes of MAHA’s collapse are not primarily about a mass defection of voters. They are about something quieter and more consequential in close races: a specific type of voter deciding not to show up because even loyalty has limits.

Republicans understood from the beginning that MAHA’s value was not in its hardcore base, which was always relatively small. The MAHA constituency includes desirable demographics—independents and some Democrats—many of whom are women, younger voters or suburbanites, according to KFF Health News. JD Vance called it “a critical part of our success in Washington.” The strategic bet was that MAHA could function as a bridge to voters who didn’t fit neatly in the MAGA coalition, particularly suburban and exurban mothers who were open to Republican economic arguments but wary of cultural instability.

The bet has not paid off this time. Republican pollster Liz Mair put it plainly: suburban women who voted for Trump over inflation concerns “are not naturally going to gravitate towards the party that puts an anti-vax guy who has a bunch of crazy theories about Tylenol.”

The internal Republican polling tells the same story in sharper numbers. A memo from MAHA Action, the movement’s political arm, identified two critical voter cohorts: a “MAHA Winnable Middle” that could be flipped to Republicans in races where candidates embraced MAHA policies, and what pollsters called “MAHA Rentals”—lean-Republican voters who, absent strong signals that their candidate supported MAHA’s agenda, would simply stay home. Both groups are heavily motivated by price transparency, pharmaceutical conflicts of interest and healthcare costs, the very issues where Kennedy’s 15-month record has been most damaging.

The Data for Progress survey conducted in March makes the vulnerability concrete. Support for a Republican candidate aligned with Kennedy’s public health approach drops from net -12 to net -36 overall after voters learn about his record, with a collapse from -22 to -51 among independents. The group falling hardest and fastest is the “soft MAHA” voter, who is sympathetic to the movement’s goals but not ideologically committed. Those voters drop 18 points in favorability after exposure to Kennedy’s record. These are not people who need to be persuaded that Kennedy is a problem. They need only to learn what he has done, and the numbers move decisively.

The White House knows this. The scripting of Kennedy’s congressional testimony, the midterms tour and the pivot to food dyes reflect a regime trying to quarantine the damage. Republicans, as KFF Health News reported, are “counting on a MAHA bounce,” having taken a drubbing in 2025 statewide races. But that bounce has not materialized. Sending Kennedy on a road show to shore up a base that watched him endorse glyphosate production and praise a pro-vaccine CDC director is, as one MAHA activist put it, like discovering your husband’s affair and being handed a bouquet.

Democrats, for their part, have a lane if they take it carefully. Progressive strategists have warned against making Kennedy himself the target, noting that attacking him as a crank risks reinforcing the perception that Democrats are captive to Big Pharma and Big Agriculture. The more effective frame, the polling suggests, is the White House’s overall governing record: the Medicaid cuts, rising healthcare costs, the NIH research cuts, the failure to stand up to the chemical companies Kennedy spent decades suing. Voters prefer candidates with backgrounds in science and medicine over MAHA-aligned candidates by nearly six to one. The 314 Action campaign to elect Democratic doctors and nurses is running directly into that opening with a message that they will actually do what Kennedy promised.

Political marriage to a malignant narcissist is doomed to fail

There is a larger warning here that extends beyond Kennedy and MAHA. The collapse of this movement is a preview of what awaits every non-MAGA wing of the Trump coalition when it discovers that the governing agenda was always MAGA-first. The fiscal hawks who believed Trump would cut spending instead got the One Big Beautiful Bill and its $3.3 trillion in deficit spending. The libertarians who believed in reduced government got the most expansive use of executive power in modern American history. And the health populists who believed Kennedy would take on corporate medicine got a secretary defending Medicaid cuts, endorsing herbicide production and reading from a White House script.

In a coalition held together by loyalty to a single leader, every faction eventually discovers the same thing: their priorities are welcome so long as they don’t cost the leader anything, and expendable the moment they do.

The MAHA voters are now, as the New York Times reported, feeling “dispirited and disillusioned.” These voters were not wrong to want cleaner food, honest science and a healthcare system that serves patients rather than pharmaceutical balance sheets. They were wrong about Kennedy, and Kennedy was wrong about the bargain he struck to get close to power.

In the end, he got close enough. He just couldn’t deliver any of it.

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