MAHA Is Going to Make America Sicker

The playbook Donald Trump and his allies are using to dismantle the United States and hand it over to the rich and powerful is, by now, clear. With their words, they’ll attack wokeness and censorship, while with their actions, they’ll aggressively push a turbocharged form of both. They’ll shake their first at the elites with one hand, and stuff cash and other favors into their pockets with the other. They’ll loudly claim to fight for the working class if it involves picking on groups they hate, but behind closed doors, they’ll work to strip workers of their rights and make them poorer.

Each time, the tactic is the same: distract Trump’s own base and the US public more generally by loudly proclaiming you’re fighting a bunch of terrible things, and while they’re looking the other way, do the very thing you’re pretending to fight.

We’re seeing this playbook used again when it comes to the vaunted Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) agenda, led and devised by now–Health and Human Services (HHS) secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. So far, Trump and his allies have focused overwhelmingly on clamping down on the wacky, nonexistent problems that RFK Jr rails against.

RFK Jr, a longtime vaccine “skeptic,” is currently using his perch at HHS to launch an assault on vaccines, both those against COVID-19 and more generally against a host of diseases, emboldening Trump allies at the state level to push to further roll back life-saving vaccine requirements.

They’re also targeting fluoride in drinking water, laying the groundwork to eliminate its recommendation by the federal government as MAGA lawmakers work to ban it in their states. Now they’re also turning their attention to “chemtrails,” which you might remember as the thing your older cousin was obsessed with when his house first got dial-up internet and is such flagrant nonsense, even Trump’s Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) felt the need to clarify it isn’t actually real.

As idiotic as this all is, it’s a campaign rooted in something fundamentally reasonable and legitimate: suspicion of foreign, possibly toxic chemicals being put into our bodies through the food we eat, the water we drink, and the air we breathe, and the desire to have some control over it.

But this is what makes the main thrust of Trump’s agenda, which RFK Jr and the rest of the MAGA movement are fully behind, so absurd. Because Trump and his underlings have spent the last seven months doing almost everything to flood our food, water, and air with all kinds of very real, very horrible pollutants, including numerous cancer-causing chemicals.

For instance, Trump’s EPA has decided to delay implementing limits on PFAS, or “forever chemicals,” in Americans’ drinking water, so called because once you ingest them, they hardly ever break down but rather simply accumulate in your body, while being linked to the development of cancers and other health problems down the line. It says it’s doing this in the name of “regulatory flexibility” — meaning as a favor to the big business polluters who have spent millions lobbying against any clamp down on the chemicals and who Trump staffed his EPA with. Trump and his team are well aware of what they’re doing to an unsuspecting US public, because it was his first administration that got the ball rolling on regulating them in the first place.

It’s not just PFAS. In only two months, Trump had ended a host of efforts to keep a variety of toxic chemicals out of Americans’ bodies, whether by dropping a lawsuit to limit the further emissions of one carcinogen into Louisiana’s “Cancer Alley,” delaying limits on another carcinogen at the behest of medical device firms, or moving to loosen safety screenings for various chemicals and the rules in place to prevent chemical disasters.

Those rules exist to avoid unleashing onto American communities hazardous substances like vinyl chloride, a carcinogen that turned East Palestine into a biohazard zone after the 2023 Norfolk Southern train derailment in Ohio, which Trump was happy to use for campaign fodder. Meanwhile, Trump has also dismantled the agency responsible for researching the impacts of chemicals so that, if they’re found to be dangerous, they can be regulated in the future — part of the completely pointless cost-cutting drive that dominated the first half of his term. This was eagerly carried out by RFK Jr in between his public warnings about “environmental toxins,” just like he said nothing about Trump’s rollback of regulations on mercury, which he had once railed against as a private citizen.

Under Trump, companies can now flood the country with this kind of poison with only a simple email to the EPA requesting that they be exempted from the rules, which his administration has granted dozens of times already. No wonder the chemical industry is feeling what it calls “palpable optimism” about Trump’s second term.

Or look at pesticides. On the campaign trail, Trump spoke about the “millions and millions of Americans” worried about “pesticides in our food” and vowed to “ensure that everybody will be protected from harmful chemicals, pollutants, pesticides.”

But once in the White House, his administration has done the exact opposite. Trump officials have assured the Big Ag lobby there will be no coming crackdown on pesticide use, took away $20 million of funding to clean pesticide-contaminated drinking water in California, are pushing to end requirements that the states add warning labels to sometimes carcinogenic pesticides, herbicides, and other products sprayed on food, and have actually reapproved the use of a particularly destructive pesticide whose scale of damage to crops and farmland one expert called “unprecedented.”

Meanwhile, get ready for your food to become a lot less healthy. Trump is preparing to cut what RFK Jr called “outdated” production standards for more than fifty food products and possibly hundreds more down the line, has eliminated as “unnecessary” two food safety committees involved in combating the rise in foodborne illnesses, and purged 3,500 employees from the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), which regulates 80 percent of the country’s food supply and finds significant violations in 1 to 2 percent of the facilities it inspects every year.

To get a sense of how disastrous this could prove, just think back to the scandal early in Joe Biden’s first term concerning a shortage of baby formula, one of the products the FDA is meant to regulate. In that instance, a stunning inspection failure led to babies being hospitalized and even dying, and a massive recall of products from one of the four companies that controls 90 percent of the US baby formula industry, causing chaos for millions of parents who suddenly couldn’t find the food they needed to feed their hungry kids.

There you have Trump and MAHA in a nutshell: if there’s a fake health crisis that got its start with urban legends from the early days of the internet, they’ll crack down on it quick and hard. If it’s real chemicals and other pollutants that will give you cancer or otherwise poison you, they’ll do everything possible to flood your food, water, and air with it.