Trump’s ‘Make America Healthy Again’ Is a Ruse

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. endorses Donald Trump during a joint campaign appearance in Arizona last month. Photo: Tom Brenner/The Washington Post/Getty Images

The day Robert F. Kennedy Jr. dropped out of the presidential race and endorsed Donald Trump, the Republican revived his pledge to establish a commission of “independent minds” that would investigate the causes of chronic illness, especially in children. It’s part of Trump’s strategy to woo Kennedy voters, according to Semafor.

In a Thursday editorial for The Wall Street Journal, Kennedy expanded on Trump’s pledge to “make America healthy again,” or MAHA, and urged the former president to require, among other policies, “nutrition classes” and another form of unproven alternative medicine “in federally funded medical schools.” Trump’s “political courage and moral clarity about the danger of our compromised institutions give us the best opportunity in our lifetimes to revive America’s health,” he added. Indeed, Trump now sounds quite a bit like Kennedy when he chooses. “We’re going to get toxic chemicals out of our environment, and we’re going to get them out of our food supply,” the former president said at a recent Pennsylvania event. “We’re going to get them out of our bodies.”

A bit rich coming from Trump, who once served college athletes a banquet of fast food at the White House. Big Pharma also has little to fear, should Trump win re-election. Trump’s pledge is light on substance; his commission would publish findings, but on its own, it doesn’t represent much of a threat to pharmaceutical companies. What’s notable, then, about Trump’s “policy” is the language he uses to describe it, and his decision to revive it now that Kennedy has endorsed him. With MAHA, Trump can appeal to Kennedy’s supporters and the Republican base at the same time. The two groups overlap because they share a deep skepticism of experts and of public health.

When Trump speaks of toxins and bids, implicitly, for purity, he operates within a much older conservative tradition. Public-health interventions have often been viewed with suspicion by those on the right’s fringe. The Birchers once believed that fluoridation was a communist plot to weaken red-blooded American patriots, a view famously lampooned by Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove. “Do you realize that fluoridation is the most monstrously conceived and dangerous communist plot we have ever had to face?” one character inquires.

The historian Kathleen Belew has written that while much of America’s “crunchy” subculture is “benign,” some far-right groups “have used it for recruitment.” Those groups include white-power organizations, including the Ku Klux Klan, neo-Nazis, and skinheads, and many promoters were women. “These bits of crunchiness included organic farming, a macrobiotic diet, neo-paganism, anti-fluoridation, and traditional midwifery,” she added. “All of these are often thought of as leftist or ‘hippie’ issues, but they appeared regularly in the robust outpouring of women’s publications in the white-power movement.”

An interest in traditional midwifery alone does not make a person a neo-Nazi. Many leftists share “crunchy” concerns about the quality of the food we eat and the water we drink — and they aren’t necessarily wrong to do so. In the ’70s and ’80s, the region around Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, was home not only to white-power groups, but to “tepee-dwelling hippie communities, alternative-lifestyle followers, northwestern outdoorsmen, fundamentalist Mormons, and survivalists unaffiliated or loosely affiliated with white supremacy,” Belew wrote. She added, “Issues common to these groups accorded with ideas of purity, an interest in survivalism, and a deep distrust of the government.” Decades later, a similar commitment to purity has surfaced in Trump’s rhetoric, and in Kennedy’s too, a trend that coincides with a growing distrust of public-health interventions among some conservative voters. The fringe is becoming mainstream.

A 2023 poll from Politico–Morning Consult found that Republican voters “are less likely than Democrats or independents to say vaccines are safe for children,” and that “as many Republicans now say they care more about the risks of vaccines than they do about the health benefits.” 48 percent of Republican voters believed the COVID vaccines were “very” or “somewhat” unsafe, and Trump primary supporters “were twice as likely as other Republicans” to question the safety of vaccines for children. Earlier, the right-wing group Moms for Liberty began in part as a reaction against masking in public schools. And on the campaign trail, Trump has said he would defund public schools that mandate COVID vaccines, despite his administration’s role in their development.

Trump won’t have to do much work to pick up some of Kennedy’s thinking. As Michelle Goldberg reported for the New York Times before Kennedy dropped out of the race, the ex-candidate often spoke of lurking environmental dangers. “Waging endless wars abroad, we have neglected the foundation of our own well-being,” Kennedy said in one speech. “We have a decaying economic infrastructure, we have a demoralized people and despairing people. We have toxins in our air and our soil and our water. We have deteriorating mental and physical health.” For Trump, a would-be strongman, the adoption of such language allows him to cast himself as the ultimate savior figure. By singling out children — an obsession for the right — Trump only adds a sense of urgency to his message.

There’s no evidence that Trump has gone completely anti-vaxx. But he doesn’t have to in order to agitate his base and pull in Kennedy’s small voting bloc at the same time. “Make America healthy again” is a way for Trump to pretend yet again that he’s invested in the common good — as he promotes language and policy that would undermine it. The former president’s health gambit is a ruse. His voters won’t care, but the rest of us should.