New Yorker writer Jessica Winter says MAHA moms are taking back seat to poisonous pesticide makers and polluters in the Trump administration, and this may affect their support in upcoming elections.
Trump’s Environmental Protection Agency is seeking reapproval for banned pesticides, and it has reduced standards on forever chemicals in air, water, and soil. The Department of Agriculture ended two funding programs that helped schools and food banks purchase from local and organic farms. Meanwhile, Winter said DOGE has purged U.S.D.A. scientists and food-safety inspectors and that the National Institutes of Health has canceled hundreds of millions of dollars in research grants related to purported MAHA priorities such as nutrition, chronic disease, and mental health.
And now the New York Times has obtained a draft of an upcoming White House report on children’s health, that Winter claims “reads like a castration-by-bureaucracy of the MAHA revolution.”
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Winter said the “Make Our Children Healthy Again Strategy” is a follow-up to a MAHA “assessment” from May that contained “numerous made-up or garbled citations.” It has plenty of phrases like “task force,” “initiative,” “framework,” “collaboration,” and “harmonizing authorization processes,” but it repeatedly pleas for “more research” on chemicals and toxins that are already accepted by the wider medical community a dangerous.
Winter reports many health-conscious moms of “the MAHA flock” have already made up their minds as well on the toxins, and they’re getting outraged at the administration’s cold feet. Winter points to a recent episode of the podcast “Why Should I Trust You?” by MAHA enthusiast Zen Honeycutt, the founder of the nonprofit Moms Across America.
“I’m horrified as a mother who is working constantly to try to reduce the toxic exposure to my children and to the children all across the country,” said Honeycutt of the rollbacks on pesticides and heavy metals regulations.
On another podcast, “Culture Apothecary” host, Alex Clark — an influencer who is affiliated with the conservative nonprofit Turning Point USA — addressed Republican-backed legislation that would shield pesticide manufacturers from lawsuits.
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“Did President Trump just hand legal immunity to pesticide companies?” Clark asked, while her guest, “clean-farming” advocate Kelly Ryerson, called the bill “the most enormous slap in the face to MAHA.”
But Winter said the fact remains that during the 2024 election cycle, the top five PACs affiliated with agribusiness companies made more than $71 million in campaign donations, almost all of which went to Republican candidates and groups.
“Trump’s 2024 reelection PAC received $10 million from the multinational conglomerate British American Tobacco, which farms an especially polluting, soil-depleting, and pesticide-intensive crop, and which has been sued for profiting from child labor,” Winter said, adding that these corporate donors are more important to Trump and the Republican Party than MAHA moms.
“If the Trump Administration went after agriculture and food companies, the ripple effects throughout Republican House districts, in particular, will be pretty major,” said political science professor Christopher Bosso, adding that Republicans will likely have to wage their midterm campaigns without the support of a “newly irate and activated MAHA coalition.”
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Read the full New Yorker Article at this link.