Plenty of Trump voters seem to have buyer’s remorse as he reneges on a range of campaign promises. The latest group are those who supported Trump for his claimed commitment to Make America Healthy Again. The slogan emerged when Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. endorsed Donald Trump for president in August 2024. Trump used it to appeal to health-conscious voters who were attracted to Kennedy and who have been dubbed MAHA Moms. After he was elected, Trump picked Kennedy as his Health and Human Services Secretary, and shortly after Kennedy was confirmed for that position, Trump issued an executive order creating a commission chaired by Kennedy that is charged with studying chronic diseases among children.
Aside from his alliance with Kennedy, Trump has done almost nothing to address voters who were focused on health-forward policies. In fact, at almost every turn, this administration is choosing corporate profits over human health. The Congressional Budget Office estimates that Medicaid cuts in the “One Big Beautiful Bill” will cause more than 10.9 million people to lose their health insurance by 2034. The bill also failed to extend current subsidies that make insurance under the Affordable Care Act affordable for millions. The CBO estimates another 4.2 million people will become uninsured as a result of those escalating premiums by 2034. It is hard to see how people in America can be healthy without insurance to afford health care.
But the assault on health goes still further. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, under Kennedy’s leadership, now recommends fewer vaccines for children, which health experts note will lead to a resurgence of preventable diseases. Indeed, that has already occurred with major outbreaks of measles and whooping cough. Limiting universal hepatitis B vaccines for newborns will lead to more infections, cases of liver cancer, and deaths. Kennedy canceled funding for mRNA research that will compromise America’s ability to battle future pandemics.
Kennedy and Trump claimed, as a core pledge of MAHA, that they would remove toxins from the food supply, but they have taken several actions directly contrary to that goal. The Environmental Protection Agency is delaying enforcement of limits on “forever chemicals” in drinking water and has proposed lowering reporting requirements for companies that use the chemicals.
Perhaps the most egregious example came on February 18 when Trump signed an executive order to encourage the production of glyphosate, the active ingredient in herbicides like Roundup that is, according to the International Agency for Research on Cancer, “probably carcinogenic to humans.” Glyphosate has been in the crosshairs of the MAHA movement, with its members seeking to get retailers to remove products with the chemical from their shelves. Kennedy himself was part of a lawsuit against Monsanto (now owned by Bayer), Roundup’s manufacturer, that initially yielded a $289 million jury award in damages in 2018 against the company (later reduced by the judge). Trump’s executive order claims it is a matter of national security to have a supply of glyphosate-based herbicides, but Lawrence O. Gostin, a public health expert at Georgetown told the NY Times that “[i]nvoking the Defense Production Act to spur the domestic production of glyphosate is a gross abuse of presidential authority.” One of the key actors in the MAHA movement has noted that the order “is making a mockery of the very voters who put his administration into office” because expanding the production of glyphosate “is a commitment to perpetuating the toxic, chemical food system that has created a sick and infertile American population.” The president of Environmental Working Group issued a statement noting that, “[i]f anyone still wondered whether ‘Make America Healthy Again’ was a genuine commitment to protecting public health or a scam concocted by President Trump and RFK, Jr. to rally health-conscious voters in 2024, today’s decision answers that question.”
Trump has shown support for chemical companies in other ways. He has appointed former industry lobbyists and executives to key government positions in which they oversee pesticide rules. Kyle Kunkler, for example, was the top lobbyist for the soybean industry and kept the pesticide dicamba in use as part of that role. Now he is the nation’s top official at the Environmental Protection Agency in charge of pesticide policy, and one of EPA’s first acts after his arrival was to propose allowing herbicides containing dicamba. Kunkler is part of a slew of former industry lobbyists in key positions.
Trump’s dismissal of human health concerns in favor of industry was also on full display when the EPA recently announced it will no longer quantify the health benefits of pollution regulations when it weighs the costs and benefits of those rules. The regulations address fine particulate pollution (colloquially known as soot) that is mainly emitted by the burning of fossil fuels.
There is a voluminous record documenting how long-term exposure to this type of pollution increases the risk of asthma, heart and lung diseases, and dementia. A landmark Harvard study of six cities that tracked thousands of people from the 1970s to the 1990s demonstrated that living in cities with greater pollution shortened people’s lives, and those findings have been replicated in hundreds of studies since then. Children whose lungs are still developing are particularly vulnerable, according to Mary Rice at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. The EPA has placed dollar figures on these costs for decades, and even as critics contended that the estimates undervalued the benefits of the regulations, the estimates still showed a high economic benefit-to-cost ratio. Rice has pointed out that “[t]he economic return is so great that even small reductions in pollution, across millions of people, translate into very large savings.” Environmental law expert Ricky Revesz notes that if health benefits are not quantified but the economic costs to industry are, it is easier for the agency to ignore health effects and rollback pollution limits, which is the agency’s plan.
Trump’s America will have sicker children, dirtier air and water, more chemicals in the food supply, and a greater number of Americans without access to health care. Any voter who thought Trump would battle corporations for the sake of children’s health are finding out what his priorities really are.
The Trump presidency is characterized by hypocrisy at almost every turn. Trump claims to be battling drug traffickers by bombing boats in the Caribbean, but at the same time he pardoned leading drug traffickers, including the former president of Honduras, Juan Orlando Hernández, and Ross Ulbricht, the founder of Silk Road, the online black market where illegal drug trafficking predominated. He claims to be a friend of law enforcement, but he pardoned people who brutally attacked police officers on January 6. He claimed in his campaign that he would “drain the swamp” of corporate and elite control of government, but his administration is dominated by billionaires, and most of his policies favor corporate America.
